The Da Vinci Code

The Da Vinci Code is worse than bad, it's totally irrelevant. Based on Dan Brown's through-the-roof bestseller, neither book nor movie adds anything to contemporary culture's discussions of classical art, religious fervor or European history, despite being explicitly about all three. If anything, each new reading or viewing of The Da Vinci Code steals a few more brain cells from its unsuspecting victims.

The book reads like a tedious episode of Jeopardy!, in which fact upon fact is relentlessly piled onto the narrative. I guess this is what passes for multi-tasking in our fast-paced world: entertainment combined with something that's good for you, the mass-market equivalent of watching TV while doing sit-ups. Meanwhile, Ron Howard's film -- a massive hit the world over -- feels like an episode of C.S.I. guest-written by Frasier and Niles Crane (Hanks's fucked-up hair even qualifies him as an honorary Crane brother). Without trying to smarten the book up or dumb it down, Howard ensures that a shitty film follows the shitty trail of a shitty book.

A director with a backbone and some insight would have recognized that Brown's book is exploitative schlock, which shamelessly picks off the easiest and most obvious targets in several controversial areas of study. If the filmmakers had z-graded the material, inviting the viewer to have some fun with the stupidity of the entire experience, this could have been a great, memorable ride. Why couldn't Sam Fuller still be around in moments like this?

An even bolder filmmaker would have concluded that movie viewers don't get off the hook as easily as Dan Brown's brain-dead followers. In creating a good movie, a responsible filmmaker would have intelligently addressed each issue on its own merits, not for exploitation or silly entertainment. I could just hear someone other than the hyper-people-pleasing, studio shill combo of Howard and Hanks saying, "We're going to make The Da Vinci Code into something smarter than its author realized it could be."

Instead, we are left with the tale of a globe-trotting, academic superstar named Robert Langdon (Hanks), who could only be created by the mind of someone who's never set foot on a university campus -- or didn't pay much attention if he did -- running around solving a murder mystery involving the Louvre, the Holy Grail, the Priory of Sion (a centuries-old cabal), and...oh who cares? As if the plot of The Da Vinci Code needs to be summarized for ten-thousandth time. An appearance by Ian McKellan attempts to make Howard's film seem legit and, while the sequences involving him are easily the best in the film, I wonder if he read the parts of the script he doesn't appear in.

The DVD has been released in a variety of formats, even as a gift set with a replica of both a working cryptex (a fancier name for a cereal box decoder) and the journals of Robert Langdon ("August 7, 2002: Dear Diary, Combed and curled my hair for three hours, wrote an essay on stop signs, fed Hooch."). There are also several featurettes that are included on every DVD release of the film, all of which are about as challenging as the film itself. These extras include an interview with Brown, as well as a segment with Ron Howard on the first day of the Da Vinci shoot, discussing how excited he is about totally fucking up the opportunity to shoot a movie at the Louvre. Or something like that. The Da Vinci Code's suckiness transforms time, space, mediums, formats, and even gift box merchandise. -- Jason Woloski