A ho-hum effort from an incredible team

Rating: 7/10 (21 May 2006)

When you begin with Ron Howard and Tom Hanks, throw in a pretty girl and some incredibly talented "character" actors like Ian McKellan and Jean Reno, you probably would expect a grade A movie. The best I can give it is a seven, and it probably deserves that much. Hooray to Howard for not including much sex (one brief scene flashes on the screen in black and white) in a movie that has Tom Hanks pretty much mopes his way through a maze of religious demagoguery that combines reasonable historic truth with unreasonable religious fiction.
Having been one of the few who never read the book I might not catch everything, but the movie simply takes too long to get where its going, and even then the muddled ending left me questioning if it was an introduction for a sequel or actually had a meaning?