Speaking of The DaVinci Code movie.....and somewhere, someone is....I must confess to being pleased to read how utterly dreadful it apparently is, evaluated strictly as cinematic entertainment. It was screened at the Cannes Film Festival and was DOA. For the most part, the reviewers hated it:
Mike Goodridge, Screen Daily:
"Ron Howard's film version is well made but chronically devoid of
the guilty pleasures it needs to make it succeed as first-rate
popcorn entertainment. Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman have
remained rigidly faithful to the chronology and events of the book,
but make ponderous work of the delicious conspiracy theories and
treasure hunt which are the phenomenon's raison d'etre."
Todd McCarthy, Variety: "A pulpy page-turner
in its original incarnation as a huge international bestseller has
become a stodgy, grim thing in the exceedingly literal-minded film
version of The Da Vinci Code."
Stephen Schaefer, The Boston Herald: "Nothing really works. It's
not suspenseful. It's not romantic. It's certainly not fun."
James Rocchi, CBS 5 television, San Francisco: "I kept
thinking of the Energizer Bunny, because it kept going and going
and going, and not in a good way."
Joe Utichi, filmfocus.co.uk: "Action set
pieces, themselves fairly pedestrian, become counterpoints to
endless exposition scenes and no amount of sweeping camera moves
can cover what is essentially a filmed lecture."
Baz Bamigboye, London's Daily Mail: "It's a movie about whether
the greatest story ever told is true or not, and it's not the
greatest movie ever screened, is it?"
Unidentified critic leaving the media screening: "Too long. And
boring. If you want to see a movie about the Holy Grail, see
Indiana Jones."
To be fair, there were at least a couple of positive reviews:
Igor Soukmanov, Unistar Radio in Belarus: "Maybe the
next day I'll forget about it. But today for two hours it was good
entertainment … As a Hollywood movie, it's a very nice
picture." (Alright, "positive" might be overstating it a bit.)
Roger Friedman, Fox News: "For most of its
overlong 2½ hours, the film is enticing. And surprising in
that it's not Tom Hanks - solid as usual - or French film star
Audrey Tautou who make the movie tick. It's Sir Ian McKellen,
who appears about a quarter to halfway through the proceedings and
very sublimely scores himself an Academy Award nomination."
According to this article:
Critics duly queued for more than an hour to get into a film
that, as everyone grumbled, was obviously too long at 148 minutes.
Cannes critics are a notoriously severe audience with little time
for anything past the 100-minute mark. Even so, the sprinkling of
titters that added sparkle to the second half of the film was more
openly derisory than usual.
The crunch moment came, however, when Tom Hanks, as the earnest
professor of symbology Robert Langdon, uttered an especially
melodramatic line. At that point, 900 weary critics laughed as one.
After a couple of hours of leap-frogging plot there had to be some
moment of relief.
When, finally, the camera swept back to Hanks, gazing through
the glass roof of the Louvre's foyer to where he had deduced - how
is uncertain, but never mind - that Mary Magdalene's sarcophagus
now lay, there was the deathly sound of no one clapping. A few
people whistled - a sign of derision in Europe - but, in truth,
The Da Vinci Code was not actually bad enough for anyone to
enjoy tearing strips off it. Like Hanks, whose face seemed to be
pursed in perplexity throughout the film, it just took itself way
too seriously. If the novel was popcorn, Howard's film was a badly
overcooked goose.
Ouch.
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