UnorthodoxY Archive It's wasn't what you thought

I went to see The Da Vinci Code a few nights back and, since everyone and their dog is talking about it and Da Vinci related nonsense (hell there’s even a diet fad), I’m going to indulge myself with a bit of a review. So, beware some spoilers for the film and book after the jump. For those not jumping, I’d recommend seeing it if you have time to kill, just don’t expect too much.

I’ve read the book, I didn’t think it was that bad but it only worked by teasing a bunch of ‘secrets’ to keep you reading through some of the slower bits until the end. I’d read The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail a good few years back so I knew where the big plot points were going anyway.

The first hour of the film suffers from the same problems as the book, it’s terribly slow and tries to keep your attention by seting up plot points to be paid off at the end, but it spends so little time on them that it you haven’t read the book you’ll miss them, and if you have you already know the pay off. People were, literally, asleep through the Paris bits in the showing I went to. It might have worked better if I bought into Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon, but he looks kind of bewildered and just accepts everything that happens without really, you know, mentioning his airtight alibi for the killing he’s being accused off or trying to get hold of a lawyer.

The film redeems itself in it’s second hour, thanks largely to Ian McKellen and Paul Bettany. I started to think that, despite its faults, that it’s building cleverly to a fast paced finish. The twists and turns in the plot were clearly working here if the gasps and jumps in the cinema where anything to go by.

It almost gets away with it, the London sequence hits all the right notes and frankly you could’ve ended the film on Ian McKellen being driven away in the police car and Hanks smirking and not really lost anything. But we have to go to Roslin for the films big reveal, and this is the first time that the main characters act as I thought they should. It’s quite a good little scene, even if what’s being said is faintly ridiculous. It goes on far too long, as it has to tie up all the teased flashbacks from the rest of the film, drawing out the scene and pretty much destroying any punch the end might have had.

And that’s not even the ending, as we go back to Paris to re-solve the riddle — opening a massive plot hole by doing so, and extending the film to a silly length for very little gain.

Like I said, it’s worth going to see for the middle part where it works very well, but if you knocked fifteen minutes off either end by being a bit less faithful to the source material then you’d solve a lot of the problems with the movie.

In the end it’s the film of the book, and it suffers because of it, as the book just isn’t as good as many people think it is. They’re trying to sign much of the same team to make Angels and Demons which is a far better book, hopefully it makes a better film.