Da Vinci Drivel

Rating: 4/10 (30 December 2006)

LOTS OF SPOILERS! With all the hoopla, I was actually tempted to go and see this movie in a theatre, as opposed to waiting until it came to my own 60" screen. I'm glad I waited. I could have waited longer. What a mess! Let's start with the good part... the locations: Great shots of the Louvre;Belvoir Castle; Eglise Saint-Sulpice; Château de Villette; Lincoln Cathedral;Rosslyn Chapel;Temple Church;Westminster Abbey; not to mention great locations like London, Paris, Malta, Scotland, many other parts of England and France. That's it. That's all the good news, except for Ian McKellen, who did as fine a job as anyone could to make his role seem plausible, although I always like Jean Reno and Alfred Molina for their work... wasted on this movie. I didn't bother to read the book. I like my history factual, not conjectural. Hopefully, it made more sense than the movie. And if it caused anyone to examine his belief in the apotheosis of Jesus, good for it. A good start for this work would have been good dialog. It didn't have it. The actors mouth the words, but they aren't believable, but since the dialog isn't either, that's all you could expect. And the plot! I don't mind Byzantine plots, but in the end, they have to make sense. This whole thing revolves around the catholic church's obsession with not letting anyone know that Jesus had a child with Mary Magdalene. OK, so I can believe that. They've been paranoid about the truth for millennia. But who can believe bishops that reveal the supposed secrets of the confessional, running around with $10M in bearer bonds, hiring assassins, bungling attempts to find the thingamabob? Ludicrous. Police officers who go around beating up people for no reason, fall for the old toss the homing device out of the window-trick- and chase a dump truck like keystone cops-bank managers who wait for 20 years for someone to come and use a magic key...etc. The explanation of "The Last Supper" and the "V" between Jesus and Mary representing the Holy Grail, and being a representation of a woman's vagina was laughable. I had to wonder how many takes it took to get through that scene before McKellen could finish without bursting into laughter. In the end, any bright person could have found the crypt of Mary Magdalene without the secret map hidden in the thingamabob with the cryptic message. It made all the chasing, hiding, people shot, money wasted, deciphering...pointless. It reminded me of when I was a child and had to send off for a secret decoder ring in order to understand the secret message from Captian Midnight's show on TV. When I got it, it was useless. So was this movie. What a mess!