As Jesus himself said, "Who do you say I am?"

Rating: 8/10 (19 May 2006)

Quite simply Dan Brown is a Gnostic. He has his reasons to attack the Catholic Church for it's 1500+years of pushing the Gnostic faith towards irrelevancy. However Dan is guilty of horrid prose, tepid dialogue and playing free and easy with facts. And He's retread a formula (a mysterious man assassinates an elderly leading authority in a field whose female progeny teams up with Robert Langdon to set about to discover a conspiracy through esoteric clues...) that he has made millions off of - which is a literary sin but not heresy. And he ends every single chapter with a mini-cliffhanger fooling people into thinking the book is a real page turner. I was rather exhausted with his books. Onto the movie. Ron Howard did an excellent job with integrating history (the crusades, nicean council, knights templar) into the flow of the movie. And they gave a more fair and balanced approach to the material with Langdon being rather skeptical at the beginning. The big explanatory scene with Ian McKellan is the best in film since Donald Sutherland's Mr. X in JFK-a movie the DaVinci Code should truly be most compared with. Some people will find the movie slow going-even boring. Not enough chase and CGI special effects. But at least it does involve thinking-unless the viewer either buys all of Dan's half-baked theories or prejudges against the hidden story. I for one found this movie to be far more thought provoking about the nature of Jesus than Passion of The Christ. But it's still no Last Temptation Of Christ.