The book was bad, the movie was worse

Rating: 1/10 (18 May 2006)

I read Brown's book because I thought where there was smoke, there had to be fire. Any book that sells this many copies must certainly be moderately well-written, right? How could so many people be wrong? Well, they were. It was horrible. I did not expect art, but the book was less artful than Tom Clancy. Pedantic, preachy, atrocious dialog, this was a book written by a man who thought that as long as he generated an intricate plot, he could skip the inconvenient step of actually WRITING. This book made Dan Brown rich, but it did not make him a writer.
But still, the underlying core of a good story was there, buried beneath the morass of tortured prose. And so I thought, if anyone could correct the fatuous language, Ron Howard and Sony could certainly afford a screenwriter capable of untangling this mess. I was wrong. It appears that the script merely lifted Dan Brown's horrible language from the book. This is the kind of writing that makes one wish the word processor had never been invented. Copy and paste screen writing. But hearing these words in your mind's ear as you read the book, uttered by characters who aren't really there, is one thing. Hearing these ridiculous lines half-heartedly recited by Tom Hanks makes them even more preposterous.
The worst movie Tom Hanks has ever made. Possibly the worst screenplay adaptation of a book this decade. And it's difficult to determine if and where Ron Howard added value.