When A Heresy Meets Hollywood

Rating: 1/10 (23 September 2007)

Well, a heresy is a heresy, after all. For hundreds of years, the ideas and concepts have been molested, falsified, distorted, changed all over and got rid of. And we live in the age of post modernism, when as it seems everything is relative and therefore any stupidity immediately catches the general attention and does become a real fad. Dan Brown with his impossibly poor book, The Da Vinci Code, did exactly that. He wrote an unimaginable mishmash of pseudo-scientific, quasi-religious, sub par ideas that he suffered greatly to collide ands then juxtapose together. See, man, the Theory of Conspiracy has nothing new beside it. We have heard that all before many times. And then, see we all know that this is a lie, outright. Let us be somehow fair to Hollywood. They did their best trying to reproduce that mixture of sheer lies, idiocy, anti-Christian paranoia and anti-Catholic stance onto the silver screen. They did. But again, they failed on several levels. First and foremost, Tom Hanks as Prof. Robert Langdon is weak, bleak, slow and very pale. He used to save a whole lousy film before, but not now. Here, Tom is certainly not the main star; he simply goes with the general anemic flow and lets it happen. Sir Ian McKellen also does not shine. He is what he is  an old man. Add a beard and a cloak, and voilà, you have the same old Gandalf again! Jean Reno plays without his usual gusto and his role is at its best schematic. Maybe, only Jurgen Prochnow saves the day with his impeccable little part, but all is swept away with Audrie Tatou's impossibly weak performance. She goggles her eyes, she utters incredibly silly maxims, and she overplays and exaggerates it all to the level of amateurism. With that all in mind, no wonder that the 2-hours' long torture never gets a desirable cohesion. The film starts very well, as a real thriller, then gets to the point of some detective story, then almost falls down to some comedy and ends up as a second  rate melodrama. I almost wanted to laugh and change the DVD for some lightweight show on TV. What a pity many had to suffer that in the cinemas! Dan Brown, with his main ally, ultra-liberal Hollywood mongers, has made a new fierce attack on Christian beliefs and values. The inedible beefsteak of utterly hilarious ideas never gets to the throat. A mere enumeration of what he tried to depict will leave any seriously thinking individual in total shock. Jesus being married and having a daughter with Mary Magdalene, herself being a kind of pagan female goddess with some sacral sexual meaning, the Temple knights fighting to save the secret, the very idea of Jesus being a mortal man only  these are all old, old fairy tales. They are old, venomous, but not as harmful as some angry believers could get it. We saw that all before, didn't we? Time will show how many new Dan Browns will appear with their abominable books and films full of gods and demons, false ideas and wrong suppositions. And Hollywood will always keep that fire burning, making shallow screening versions, with poor plot and bad play. I pity Hanks, Reno, and Tatou, all others who wasted their talents on that low-key, tasteless treatise. Time will show. People will gladly forget this ditty, never having become a real song. A heresy is a heresy. It was, is and will always be.