The Da Vinci Code (2006)

Stunning, brilliantly formed and well worth watching. Unfortunately, that was just the guy who sold me my giant Pepsi. As for the film itself, it wasn't any of those things.

To be fair, there were one or two parts I enjoyed. It wasn't totally devoid of thrills, and it wasn't unwatchable - it was just mediocre, for the most part.

It was obvious from the start this was going to require a major suspension of my critical faculties if I was going to get any enjoyment out of it. The film opens with a lecture by symbologist Robert Langdon (Hanks), who asks his audience to identify a series of symbols, before deconstructing their interpretation. The interplay between Hanks and his audience (in the film) is embarrassingly unrealistic, and the first of several clumsy foils designed simply to fill in the cinema audience on Dan Brown's concepts.

In the next unbelievably clumsy scene, a detective interrupts a book signing to call on Langdon's assistance in solving a murder. None of this "May I have a quiet word, sir?"; rather, the detective slams down a gruesome photograph of the corpse in plain view of Langdon's entourage of fans, and announces the gory details of the case to anyone within earshot. I was beginning to worry if the preamble was so unconvincing in its details, how would I handle the conspiracy theories when they appeared?

And so it's off to the Louvre for Langdon, where the fun begins. He and his newfound cryptographer friend, Sophie Neveu, begin the quest to solve the enigma surrounding her grandfather's gory death. The chain of events from hereon is unintentionally hilarious, bearing all the sophistication of a Scooby Doo mystery. One clue leads to another, leads to another and then another, all in ridiculously far-fetched fashion.

So far, to be frank, the film is totally lacking in entertainment. It continues like this for about an hour, at which point Sir Ian McKellen arrives to save the day. Again, it all gets pretty clumsy here, for now Langdon is roped in as a foil, giving McKellen lots of opportunity to expand on the lengthy background to Dan Brown's conspiracy theories. However, McKellen is so enjoyable to watch that his appearances are by far the most entertaining parts of the film.

The rest of the film unfolds in a somewhat pacier way, but it gets going too late to redeem the picture, and even then it isn't terrifically exciting or suspenseful, just marginally more interesting. With the exception of McKellen, the actors are bland as can be, playing cardboard characters that we really could care less about. The film tries too hard to wow us early on, without bothering to give us characters we can relate to, and ultimately we only find out the barest essentials about who they really are - just the necessary contrivances to convince us that they play a cosmically significant role in Brown's incredible conspiracy.

It's also overlong. There are three or four endings before the actual ending, by which time all I could think about was getting another glimpse at the popcorn boy on the way out. I'm shallow, I know. But then, looked at logically and dispassionately, the prospect of a future with Popcorn Boy seemed infinitely more probable than anything on the screen.