About as mediocre as they say

Rating: 4/10 (5 June 2006)

I have said it before and I have to say it again: "True-to-the-book-Adaptations" kill potentially good films. Why filmmakers, or film goers for that matter, has not seen the genius of Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING when it comes to adapting a book, is strange. Why hasn't film yet tried to break free from it's artistically inferior position and stopped slaving behind The Novel. Film is a visual medium. The Novel is, most of the time, not. THE DA VINCI CODE is another example of a bad film that had every potential to be good.
Of course, I couldn't read the book. I found it to be a case of ridiculously poor writing with silly cliffhangers at the end of literary every chapter. I threw it away after four chapters with a feeling of being humiliated as a reader. I had, to say the least, low expectations of the film. Then again, a good opportunity to be open minded.
But the film *was* bad. The main reason is the bad craftsmanship, something that I was truly surprised about. I figured Ron Howard was competent enough to make a Hollywood thriller (RANSOM is underrated) but here we have a Tom Hanks for five minutes, suddenly accused for murder, then an Audrey Tatou hops on the bandwagon - everybody is acting very excited; but the excitement has not been built up, nor has the characters. The result: I don't care about them or their situation. I don't even buy it. And then follows 2.5 hours of not caring or buying, in a plot that constantly is fairly predictable and filled with used tricks. Some defenders have called this a "thinking man's movie". How difficult is it to follow a film that is explanatory beyond the ridiculous; - Unless the letters aren't in it's right place... - An ANAGRAM! - An anagram! Come on...
And then of course, the whole "respect for the book"-idea kills off the film even more. The film is EXTREMELY talky and UNBEARABLY long. That could be good book material. Can we all agree that it is not good film material? Where is the suspense? Where is the excitement? Nowhere of course, since the filmmakers have been too busy reading the book to be thinking of making a good film. This could have been a tight, sweaty two hour cat-and-mouse-film. It could have been anything. It's a filmed book, with the book's "fill the characters up with your imagination"-characters, filler sequences that give coherence to the novel's story (but is dragging the FILM along) and it's "take your time"-ending. This film never ends. It goes on forever, until every drop of the mystery is solved. The mystery that we figured out all about 2 hours ago.