fiction based on fiction

Rating: 3/10 (18 May 2006)

My mother and I decided to see this movie last night, out of curiosity.
I have not read the book, my mother has. Both of us ended up wishing we had not decided to sit through this painfully tedious, laughably inaccurate tripe.
To be honest, I was greatly disappointed. I had heard a great deal about how, despite the glaring inaccuracies in the story relating to art and religious history facts, it is a well paced, exciting story. I was expecting to enjoy the movie as a thriller.
Perhaps the screenplay did not do justice to the novel; yet people who have read the book and reviewed the movie claim it is fairly faithful to the elements of the plot in the book. I remain incredulous as to why on earth anyone would take this story as fact? It didn't even allow me to suspend my disbelief for the sake of the story, let alone convince me that the things it claimed could have happened.
Having said all of the above, Ian McKellen and Paul Bettany in particular do all they can to enjoy their roles. The failure of the movie is not related to the quality of the actors; it is simply that they had so little good material here to work with