Mediocre adaptation

Rating: 5/10 (20 March 2010)

I won't color my attitude of the movie with any notions about the subject matter. The movie only adapts the story of the best-selling novel. Obviously it wouldn't have been funded and produced had the book not established a following; controversy didn't hurt either.
I watched this movie in the theater when it first came out, and I didn't find it captivating. I spent a lot of mental energy trying to follow it. I recently read the book (finally) and I found it not hard to follow at all. I found myself wondering what was wrong with the movie, that it couldn't capture the disturbingly over-explained exposition in Dan Brown's writing style. I watched it again this evening and I find the big problem to be that it follows the story too well.
The story about the search for some great secret, a race between the hero and heroine and a criminal reformed by a sect of the Catholic church. They want to preserve the secret and he wants to destroy it. We spend most of the movie, as we spent most of the novel, not quite being told what the secret is, but it is clear from the beginning that it involves some of the great names in history - Leonardo da Vinci, Jesus Christ, Isaac Newton, etc. It must have something to do with the church, and there is a lot of implication (and explication) about the church having forced the secret to be kept hidden.
Without debating whether the story has any validity, or even whether it is clever or pedestrian, the strength of it is in the way the story is told. Dan Brown wrote the book in short chapters, changing the point of view, working in minor cliffhangers of ideas here and there to keep the reader pushing forward. It is a quick read, as books go. However, when this is filmed scene by scene, it becomes tedious. It seems necessary to go into such detail, given the nature of the story, building on little bits of history and the revision and speculation of history as it has been unwritten and rewritten and wondered at even into our times.
Two things this movie needed were a sharper screenplay, and a director interested in pacing the story by the key plot elements, not just the action sequences.
Ian McKellan is excellent as Leigh Teabing. Even in his long explanations of da Vinci's "The Last Supper" and the implied symbology contained in the composition of it, he sparkles, simply by the power of his well-trained and well-used voice. Jean Reno lives up to expectation equally well as the French police Captain chasing the hero and heroine.
Tom Hanks is disappointing as Robert Langdon, the hero who happens to know the history inside and out, but has trouble with relatively simple anagrams that has most viewers (as readers) guessing the answer ahead of him. Tom gives us no sympathy for the character, playing him as a nearly obnoxious know-it-all that he seems in the book. Strange that he never seems to know much, but when he speaks, you would think he is only playing with us. Tom doesn't fit the image of Robert as an intellectual. He plays it as if he's the gamemaster who doesn't know what the game is. It doesn't make the viewer root for him or want to listen to his input as the story progresses. But his input and his point of view are vital and the lackluster performance gave us only the drawing star-power of a two-time Oscar winner, but none of the payoff of such a presence in the film.
Keeping with the book, the film has trouble finding its climactic moment. It plays on continuing the viewers' thought processes, as if we are supposed to be left with a sense of wonder about these so-called revelations that we have encountered in the story. By the time it ended, I couldn't manage to care, even though I wanted to.