Code Anesthetic

Rating: 5/10 (26 May 2006)

"Symbolism is," says Professor Robert Langford and pauses to survey an auditorium full of presumed idiots, "a language." Thus begins Tom Hanks tight-lipped portrayal of a Harvard intellectual growing increasingly aware with every turn and twist of plot that he is trapped in a very, very bad script.
Some reviewers found the film, like Hanks' hanks of unkempt hair, overly long. I didn't, but then I took a cigarette break when Ian McKellan as Sir Leigh Teabing began his GEE (Grand Explanation of Everything) lecture, and still got back in time for the last two paragraphs.
The film has all the elements of a thriller - car chases, narrow escapes, unraveling of a mystery clue by clue, plot reversals - yet somehow manages to stay flatter than a 70-mile drive across the King Ranch. Tom Hanks' final monologue, his personal struggle to resolve the mystery of a Jesus human enough to beget children yet divine enough to inspire prayers from a drowning child, might have soared - but it limps its lame way toward the million-dollar pay window.
With schlock ideas voiced by kitsch characters caught in a best-seller-dumb plot, the movie anesthetizes. And that's a good thing. In the closing scene, Jesus' last living descendant, Sophie (Audrey Tautou, who has spent the last two hours acting puzzled and cute) dips her foot in a pond to show that she is not going to walk on water any time soon - and the audience is too numb even to groan.