Critics on Wednesday crucified Hollywood’s hotly awaited film of the runaway bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, ahead of its glittering premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
Several disappointed whistles were all that greeted the end of Ron Howard’s $125-million film, and, even worse, the 2 000-strong audience even burst out laughing at the movie’s key moment.
Daily Variety, the top Hollywood trade magazine, gave it a blistering review, saying the novel, which has sold about 50-million copies worldwide, ”has become a stodgy, grim thing in its exceedingly literal-minded film version”.
Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman ”conspired to drain any sense of fun out of the melodrama, leaving expectant audiences with an oppressively talky film that isn’t exactly dull, but comes as close to it as one could imagine with such provocative material”.
But Howard brushed aside the criticism, saying his film was pure entertainment and he hoped it would still prove a crowd pleaser.
”I haven’t read any of the reviews, and I don’t know … if any of the others might be slightly more upbeat,” Howard told a packed press conference.
”I’ve made a lot of commercial films and I really stopped prognosticating a long time ago,” he added.
Star Tom Hanks, who plays symbologist Robert Langdon who is thrown into a hunt to resolve a 2 000-year-old mystery, also shrugged off the controversy provoked by the film’s central premise that descendants of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene survive today.
”As a guy who likes to go see movies I certainly like two things. I like, certainly like, crackerjack entertainment. I like to be exposed to the same sort of film that a book is as a page-turner,” he said.
”But at the same time I also do want to be challenged somehow. I want to see films that are provocative, so that I have great things to talk about and argue about once the movie is over.”
Sir Ian McKellen, who plays Holy Grail expert Leigh Teabing, said movie fans could take from the film and the book what they liked.
”When I read the book I believed it entirely. I believed Leigh Teabing argued his case very convincingly, and clever Dan Brown for twisting my mind in the right direction,” said McKellen, talking about the character he plays.
”And when I put the book down I thought what a load of potential codswallop.”
The film was to officially open the 59th Film Festival at a glittering red-carpet ceremony also to be attended by French representatives of the Catholic Church.
One senior official heaved a sigh of relief after catching the preview, saying the movie was so unbelievable it posed no threat to their faith.
”There’s nothing to get whipped up about, even for a member of the Opus Dei,” said Marc Aellen, secretary general of a Catholic cinema association.
”I really liked the book — as a suspenseful novel. But it was dishonest to mix fact and fiction in such a way. However, you just don’t believe for one second in the film and that discredits the theory completely,” he said.
Other critics agreed. ”Tom Hanks was a zombie, thank goodness for Ian McKellen. It was overplayed, there was too much music and it was much too grandiose,” Peter Brunette, critic for the United States daily The Boston Globe, told Agence France-Presse.
”At the high point, there was laughter among the journalists. Not loud laughs, but a snicker and I think that says it all,” said Gerson Da Cunha from The Times of India.
The book has already been translated into 44 languages and spawned a spin-off tourist industry, as well as whipping up a controversy, all ingredients to ensure that despite the poor reviews, the film, which also stars Audrey Tautou as cryptologist Sophie Neveu, will still undoubtedly draw early crowds.
Despite being filmed on location against the backdrop of some of Paris’s and London’s most impressive and historic buildings — Howard even gained permission to film inside the Louvre — the film is unconvincing, overly relying on documentary style historic flashbacks and neglecting its duty to build suspense.
”The film version of The Da Vinci Code is ultimately a flawed and lifeless adaptation,” wrote online reviewer for filmfocus.co.uk, Joe Utichi.
”There’s nothing technically wrong with Howard’s film, but Brown’s approach to the novel is essentially untranslatable and that’s perhaps more a criticism of the book than the film.”
Blooper fans will also have fun spotting some of the errors in a Paris chase scene. — AFP
