DVD | The Da Vinci Code

Rating: M - Contains Medium Level Violence.
Duration: 143 mins.
Genre: Suspense & Thriller,.
Actors: Audrey Tautou, Paul Bettany, Tom Hanks, Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina, Jean Reno, Jürgen Prochnow.
Release Date: Available Now.

I said when this movie was first announced, that it would suck big time. With Ron Howard driving it and Tom hanks in the lead role, nothing good could come out of the movie.

Often watching a movie with such low expectations you can be pleasantly surprised. After all you weren’t expecting much so just about anything would be an improvement. The problem with The Da Vinci Code is that it was even more of a disappointment than I had expected.

The book on the other hand was great, if somewhat preachy. The pacing was dynamic, the characters lovable and the whole mystery was, well mysterious, if a whole load of bollocks.

But none of that was passed onto the movie.

To start with, Tom Hanks was the wrong person for the part, but I’d had time to get used to that, and in the end I will accept that maybe he was all right. But the movie was devoid of action. It had about as much suspense as a snail race involving two dead snails. The movie was also a visual mess of confusion, as Howard and his writers tried to cram a significant piece of fiction into a two hour twenty-three minute timeslot.

Possibly if I hadn’t read the book when it came out, there would have been a little more suspense, but due to the amount of publicity surrounding the book and movie you’d have to be a deaf, dumb and blind hermit not to know the big surprise at the end.

Not that Howard left it too the end to give huge visual clues to what the climax was.

The cinematography (at least in the present storyline) was crisp, but that too was problematic, with Howard going for cool trendy modern shots when the action was supposed to be heating up, leaving what little action the script had, colder and more lifeless than a rotting carcass of a dead fish on a Siberian beach.

All in all probably the biggest cinematic disappointment to come out on DVD this year. Avoid it like a plague of zombies.

Food for thought:
If the truth is a lie, does that mean there’s no hope?

Rent or Buy?
Neither. Read the book.