[Screen scene] "The Da Vinci Code" – Ron Howard

Columbia Pictures

Jake Tracer
Published: Friday, May 19, 2006

During the opening credits of Ron Howard’s by-the-book adaptation of “The Da Vinci Code,” words appear on the screen in a very simple manner. Instead of materializing the cryptic subject matter of Dan Brown’s thriller into an opening sequence that has words and numbers flashing everywhere to eventually reveal their hidden meanings, Howard simply offers the necessary information and crisply moves on. Never before has it been so obvious that what will appear for the next 149 minutes is a movie, and nothing more.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Movies can be entertaining, and “The Da Vinci Code” certainly is – but that’s all it is. In the weeks leading up to the film’s release, the publicity campaign behind the movie hyped “The Da Vinci Code” into a must-see event, inevitably raising expectations of the film itself in the process. Sporting a superstar cast that includes Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou and Ian McKellen, “The Da Vinci Code” seemed ready to reinvent the action-adventure summer blockbuster.

Much like the subject matter of the story, illusions can be more powerful than reality. The film is a competent adaptation of the book and deserves its spot amid summer fare like “Mission: Impossible 3” and a bunch of superhero movies. It doesn’t, however, stand out among them. Though Howard’s “Da Vinci Code” grazes the book’s ceiling of potential, the marketing campaign has raised that ceiling a few feet higher. Only a giant could reach it, and the film is merely tall.

It might seem unfair to judge a film based on the media frenzy around it, but when expectations are higher than high, it’s impossible not to. At the press screening I attended, I overheard one man exclaim, “Dude, everyone from ‘Entertainment Tonight’ is here!” and noticed more than one TV news truck on site to interview people about the film’s religious implications. To save space, I’ll sum those up in just a sentence: If the church is afraid of “The Da Vinci Code,” that says more about the church than the film.

On its own, the film reflects Brown’s entertaining story with the kind of polished filmmaking expected of the creative team and cast. At times, characters obviously talk for the sake of the audience rather than fellow characters, such as when Sophie (Tautou) describes the detailed inner workings of a cryptex to Robert Langdon (Hanks), who already knows that information and more. Fortunately, such obvious meltdowns are generally few.

For the most part, Howard handles the difficult combination of action sequences and art history lectures by highlighting the former and limiting the latter; most of the lectures feature visual representations of the events being described so the film doesn’t turn into a drawing-room conspiracy of talking heads. The technique works, but is in no way new or cinematically interesting. The codes, though meaningless, are more intriguing in “A Beautiful Mind.”