So pointless the con of the audience

Rating: 4/10 (28 May 2006)

I have read that some evangelicals are hoping to use this film to lure 'em in and then convert them once they're hooked. This is brilliant because, while this film appears to be subversive, it really buttresses the church's appeal, because the biggest threat to faith today is not radical reinterpretations, but profound indifference.
The interpretation presented here certainly has its attractions. I wouldn't mind if it were true, and so I can see why many want it to be true The filmmakers, though, want to imply that revealing this interpretation would change faith, while hedging their bets a bit in how they present this, but by this they just show that they don't understand faith, which does not have that much to do with kooky historical riddles.
It doesn't help that said riddles hold far too much resemblance to the kind of deliberately-outlandish puzzle solving found in the Adam West Batman, in which connections and conclusions are drawn out of thin air. Other problems here include the tendency to spent several scenes getting us nowhere and then give us half of the entire mystery in a big monologue, Tom Hanks' astonishing, mind-numbing flatness, the incoherence of the present-day conspiracies and betrayals, and so on.