That’s the question I was asking myself thirty minutes into The Da Vinci Code.
Of course, I knew intellectually who the characters were before I stepped into the theater, but the film did next to nothing to tell me who they were and it did absolutely nothing to establish them as presences on screen who I should care about. They’re just emotionally null images who show up and start running around and doing . . . stuff.
Lots of . . . stuff.
Like . . . y’know . . . driving around in cars backwards in traffic really fast and looking at secret messages written in ink that only shows up in ultraviolet light and talking a lot about symbolism and God and getting shot at repeatedly and . . . and . . . and the Mona Lisa was in it, too! (For about five seconds.) . . . And there were a couple of churches . . . I think.
Oh! And the movie was set in France! Yes! I definitely remember that! France was in the movie!
The movie was a horrible, horrible mess. I mean, you may have thought that The Big Sleep was hard to follow, but that’s nothing compared to the mess that The Da Vinci Code is. The Big Sleep also has one big advantage over this movie: The Big Sleep is actually interesting.
Not Opie’s latest opus!
Man, is it boring! B-O-R-I-N-G!
Its boringness virtually overwhelmes its offensiveness. I kept yawning audibly through the whole thing.
It fails to establish who the characters are. It fails to establish their motives. It fails to establish why we should care about them. It fails to establish what they’re thinking. It fails to establish how they know what they know. It’s just a huge, sprawling, poorly-communicated mess.
And the overdramatic soundtrack is frequently shrilling overdramatically to tell you that this is a dramatic (!) movie because nothing you’re seeing on the screen is telling you that.
And somebody apparently spiked Richie Cunningham’s drink with a tab of acid, because there’s all these flashbacks and hallucinations and visions interrupting in the middle of sentences every five minutes, like when they’re going to Isaac Newton’s tomb and all of a sudden–for no reason at all, mind you–Mulder and ScullyLangdon and Neveu are suddenly surrounded by all these people from the 18th century, which only the audience (not the characters) can see.
Other film critics have talked about how there is no chemistry between Tom Hanks and the French actress who is in the Agent Scully role, but they’re not telling you the half of it! I mean, these two characters are so emotionally inert that from now on the nuclear waste management agency will be using their relationship to insulate spent uranium rods.
The only time the movie gets a little interesting is when Ian McKellan shows up as a walking anagram who hates the Church and is obsessed with the Holy Grail and injects a bit of humor into the movie.
He gets both of the movie’s intentionally funny lines.
One occurs when he is bluffing his and his manservant’s way past the police by telling them, "I’ve got a medical appointment that I can’t be late for, so if you are really that determined to stop us, you’ll just have to shoot us."
Then he jerks his head toward his manservant and says, "Start with him."
The other intentionally funny line occurs when McKellan has been unmasked as a villain (You weren’t expecting a spoiler-free review, were you?) and as he’s being bundled into a police car, he’s shouting hysterically about Tom Hanks: "That man has a map to the Holy Grail!"
Okay, you kinda have to be there for that one, but in context it was funny, and deliberately so.
That’s not the case with most of the funny lines in the movie. One of the best unintentionally funny lines is when Agent Scully is musing over the fact that Mary Magdalen’s sarcophagus has been moved and she says . . .
<overdramatic petulant French girl voice>The Church, did they finally . . . "get her"?</overdramatic petulant French girl voice>
Or when the Opus Dei cop tells another French cop who is a major character (his boss? his partner? his junior? his peer?) that he got a call from an Opus Dei bishop who told him that he’d just heard the confession of a killer named Fox MulderRobert Langdon and that’s why he’s so fanatically obsessed with catching Tom Hanks.
Some images in the movie are unintentionally funny, too, like when we get a flashback to the Council of Nicaea and it looks like a Renaissance-era, hypercaffeinated high school debate club complete with bleachers.
At what feels like the end of the movie we get a nice moment when Ian McKellan gets bundled off for being a homicidal nut job and you’re thinking, "Whew! Now that that’s over we can all get up and go home!" But NOOOOOOOOOOOO! There’s a whole nother sixteen hours in the movie that we have to sit through!
And in this sixteen hours we go back to the kind of boring, chaotic, poorly-explained, un-Ian-McKellanized . . . stuff . . . that dominated the first act of the film.
Like that conversation near the end of the film (only about three hours before the credits roll) between Mulder and Scully where Mulder is trying to convince her that she shouldn’t be so scientific and that what you believe is what is ultimately important and that if the audience claps its hands really hard then Tinkerbell will come back to life and maybe it’ll destroy or renew the Christian faith if she goes public with the fact that she’s the last surviving descendant of Jesus Christ (Sorry, if you didn’t want spoilers then you should have bailed when I outed Ian McKellan). Only he’s too convoluted for any of this conversation to make sense.
And then Scully ditches Mulder to go off with the secret sex cult that worships her (yeah, okay, I can buy that one) and he goes back to his hotel and starts shaving and he (dum! dum! dum!) cuts himself (hey, they’ve still got three hours before the credits; they have to fill it with something) and (I am not making this up!) he looks at the blood from his shaving nick and gets a VITAL CLUE (which makes no sense) to the location of the tomb of Mary Magdalen (who is buried in the Louvre, it turns out) and he goes out into the night running like a madman and . . . and . . . FAILS to find her tomb!
THE END!
Only it’s supposed to be a moving ending because he’s kneeling and maybe praying–or something–several hundred feet above her tomb, which he can’t see and only guesses is there.
And so the audience is left with bunches of unanswered questions like . . .
Why did Agent Scully decide to suddenly destroy her career as a French police woman for no good reason?
and
Who the heck was the bank manager working for when he decided to try and kill Mulder and Scully for no reason?
and
Did the evil albino who’s a hyper-religious Catholic know that Scully was a descendant of Jesus Christ–as seemed implied–or not–and if he did then why would a hyper-religious Catholic like him want to kill her?
and
Did that evil Opus Dei bishop know that Scully was a descendant of Jesus Christ–as seemed implied–and if so then how did he know it since her name had been changed and her identity masked to keep the Church from knowing that she was still alive? And why would he want to kill a descendant of his Savior?
and
Why did the French Opus Dei cop destroy the very piece of evidence that would have been most useful in a court of law to prove that Robert Langdon was the killer of the museum guy and then ruthlessly hunt him down for murdering the museum guy?
and
How on earth did the murdered museum guy have enough time as he was bleeding to death to strip nekkid and cover himself with ritualistic symbols in blood (and why would he do that, anyway?) and then think up a bunch of puzzles needed to write three secret messages in ultraviolet ink in different parts of the Louvre? And why was he carrying ultraviolet ink around with him to begin with?
and
Why would the museum guy go to all that trouble instead of just writing, "Please tell my granddaughter to go to Rosslyn Chapel and she’ll find a bunch of people who can tell her about her family. She doesn’t need to destroy her career as a cop and go on the lam from the law and put her life in danger repeatedly as she solves a bunch of superfluous puzzles. Honest!"?
and
Why would the museum guy write secret messages in ultraviolet ink on two of Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpieces, and even if he were going to do that, why didn’t he write the important message on the first masterpiece? Why write an unimportant message on the first masterpiece simply to lead his granddaughter to the second?
and
Didn’t Ron Howard realize that stories about solving puzzles are only fun if the audience has the experience of being able to solve the puzzles with the characters on the screen and that it’s no fun at all if the puzzles are so complex that the audience can’t solve them and only gets to watch the characters on screen repeatedly pulling the answers out of thin air?
and
What’s the point of telling the audience that a particular series of numbers is the Fibonacci series if you don’t tell the audience what the Fibonacci series even is? (I mean, I used to be a math major, so I knew the answer to that one, but it’s still bad filmmaking. Ron Howard was NOT making this movie with me in mind, I can assure you.)
and
At just what point did Ron Howard and Tom Hanks realize that they were giving a huge number of people a really strong disincentive to ever see a Ron Howard or Tom Hanks movie again in the future?
and
Why is the Mona Lisa so important that it’s in all the advertising for this movie, when it shows up for about five seconds and its only significance is that it got vandalized by the museum guy with ultraviolet ink?
and
Why is Leonardo Da Vinci mentioned in like two scenes in this movie when he gets title billing?
and
What the heck is the Da Vinci code, anyway?
