Da Da Vinchy Code

Rating: 1/10 (19 December 2006)

Dan Brown faced many weeks in court for plagiarism over this book, and somehow escaped, although it seemed to me that Holy Blood, Holy Grail, written by two TV producers in the early 1980s, certainly WAS the story behind it. Brown dodged the suit by having added all the daft puzzles that punctuate the so-called action. I visited a village on the Camargue coast called Les Trois Saintes Maries, where the tradition goes that the three Marys of the Holy Story landed and lived on, thus many people in the South of France would find nothing surprising about the basic proposal behind the balderdash that Brown trowels on top of it, replete with cod-codes in doggerel English verse --- a language that started to be used some thirteen hundred years after the Holy Story was invented. But it's fair enough that Brown published this rubbish: it's the millions of readers who lapped it up who need their heads read. They poured in to this movie in their millions, too, and the participants must be laughing all the way to the bank. The whole thing is preposterous, never believable for more than one minute, lousily written, appallingly acted and utterly gauche from start to finish. The mad monk, Silas, belongs in a horror film, his Opus Dei mentor in a farce, and the English Milord in a mental hospital. Even the requisite romance between the leading lady and the protagonist never occurs. When Hanks pulls it all out and announces: "You are the closest living descendant of Jesus Christ" our house rocked with wild laughter --- so thanks for that, at least, Mr Hanks.