Disappointing and tedious

Rating: 4/10 (30 December 2006)

Granted, Dan Brown's intriguing though incredibly poorly written book would have been a real challenge for anyone to turn into film. Ron Howard has always had such an unfailing sense of narrative film-making that I was certain he of all people could pull it off.
But, sadly, he doesn't. Nothing seems to work, from the dark, murky photography to the miscasting of Tom Hanks as Langdon to the wooden, flat dialogue to the poor use of locations and the confusing and disjointed narrative. There are long stretches of film which are in French and the resulting distraction of subtitles slows the film down even more. Why do that? It's not necessary! Speaking accented English with a few words in French would have made the same point. We KNOW they speak French in France, for God's sake. This is an American film from a book written in American English, by an American filmmaker for an American audience. Putting those stretches in French was just unbearably pretentious.
So much of the film was disjointed that Zimmer's over the top score had to work overtime to create any kind of tension, involvement or emotional impact. It reminded me of what Jack Warner used to do when he saw that a film he was producing wasn't working: he'd say to the composer, "Write more music!" And in this case, LOUDER music!
Too bad. This film COULD have raised some serious issues to a very large public of non-readers...but it's so poor it never stands a chance of doing that. The message gets lost in the mess.