Shared Darkness

Amélie’s Audrey Tautou)
comes to Langdon’s assistance, and together they wriggle free of
Fache’s custody; she also eventually reveals herself to be Sauniere’s
estranged granddaughter. At issue for the duo are a series of coded
messages that Sauniere has left. These messages lead to a key, and the
key in turn to even more clues that all point to a secret about the
mythical Holy Grail and Jesus Christ of Nazareth — a secret that a
shadowy Opus Dei council, led by Bishop Aringarosa (Alfred Molina),
will stop at nothing to destroy. Wanted by Interpol, Langdon and Neveu
manage to stay one step ahead of Fache and solicit the assistance of
Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellan), an old colleague of Langdon’s.

The labyrinthine conspiratorial mysteries that unfold in jet-setting
fashion all over Europe and neatly unravel in the movie over the course
of 36 hours or so are, of course, wildly improbably condensed, but to
get hung up on that is to miss the point. National Treasure and
any number of other historical thrillers are based on equally
implausible or fancifully ridiculous turns, but nowhere near this
dramatically inert; lightness afoot is the key to their success.

Howard and Goldsman, however, seem to fundamentally misread the
appeal of Brown’s book — its sugary surface touch with intricate
conspiracies, its savvy commingling (and co-opting?) of history and
religion with more traditional elements of the thriller genre. It’s the
literary equivalent, I assume, of sugar-free dessert; one reads it and
feels like they’re somehow smarter or healthier than before they
started. The big twist of the movie centers around “the greatest hoax
perpetrated on mankind,” or whatever they’re calling it, yes, but the
filmmakers and every member of the cast save McKellan seems to be
ground into the shoals of dullness by the weight of that quote-unquote
obligation. Howard attempts to ratchet up the profundity of it all by
shooting dark, dour frames and working in some transposed backdrops to
help “connect” present and past, but what this chiefly means is long,
chunky passages of didactic exposition. What does pass for character
development — say, Neveu taking Langdon to a park and buying drug
paraphernalia off a lingering junkie so that they then “have a moment
to think” — is frequently downright laughable.

Hanks soldiers through this muddled affair as best he can, but
evidences no discernible chemistry with Tautou, who is a charming
actress out of her depths here. Only McKellan breathes some quirky,
sardonic life into his role as Teabing. Everyone else seems to be
solemnly intoning from one of the various narrated guidebooks for the
cottage industry of Da Vinci Code travelogue tours. (Columbia/Sony, PG-13, 148 mins.)