Too much exposition and not enough character interplay make this adaptation of the Dan Brown mega-seller something of a disappointment, and the Catholic Church shouldn’t worry that many people will buy its far-fetched conspiracy theory.
Apparently there was a best-selling novel on which this
movie is based, but I didn’t read it. For those similarly uninformed, it’s the
tale of a Harvard scholar (Tom Hanks), and expert on symbols, who teams up with
a Parisian police investigator (Audrey Tautou) to solve a murder linked,
somehow, with the Catholic Church. So brainy is the scholar that he can see a
mysterious writing left by the dead man and immediately discern that it must be
an anagram, and can even more quickly solve it. But it’s just the first in a
series of riddles that lead back to a mystery behind events of the church’s
earliest days. There’s a ton of plot here, and, to her credit, screenwriter
Akiva Goldsman manages to make most of it comprehensible in two and a half
hours. I couldn’t have recounted the sequence of events after seeing the movie,
but I more or less followed the action while it was going on. There’s a brief
car chase, and some gunplay, but most of this “action” is Hanks or Tautou
explaining the significance of this mysterious object or that historical
detail. Some of this detail is real, but the conspiracy theory at the heart of
the story seems ludicrously far-fetched, which made the story less compelling.
Moreover, Hanks and Tautou are a couple of the most likeable actors anywhere,
but their characters are both fairly flat here. This is the third collaboration
of Goldsman with director Ron Howard, but whereas A Beautiful Mind and
the underrated Cinderella Man were very character-driven movies, that
aspect is surprisingly absent. Only Ian McKellen, as a scholarly acquaintance
of Hanks’s Professor Langdon, adds a bit of levity to all the turgid
exposition. (Paul Bettany, as an ultra-creepy, ultra-pious murderer for God, is
also very effective.)
posted 8/19/13
No comments:
Post a Comment