So, God was NOT my copilot?

Rating: Null/10 (19 May 2006)

Despite reports of bad reviews, I didn't find this one nearly as hard to take as I expected. That's not to say it is any Hitchcockian masterpiece, either, although it has a Hitchcock feel to it in places.
It is a slick, well directed, well produced Hollywood thriller/potboiler that, after an excruciatingly long opening sequence in the Louvre, is off and running, running so fast at times that it is hard to keep up with.
Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou star as two people on a quest to find the Holy Grail (so to speak) and Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina and Jean Reno, among others, play the bad guys dedicated to keeping them from their goal.
While the acting is uniformly solid, and the direction crisp, the film takes a good deal of suspension of disbelief for it to work, not in accepting the premise, but in making peace with the rich collection of murderous bad guys menacing the hero and heroine. Of particular note is Paul Bettany as an albino monk turned hit man who, when he is not trying to murder people, engages in naked self flagellation, apparently to atone for sins past, present, and presumably future. He was probably not intended to exactly provide comic relief for this story, but he is always just one step away from pure parody. In fact, in some ways he would have fit in better in a Mel Brooks movie and you can almost count on his being roasted on Saturday Night Live.
I have never been much of a Tom Hanks fan and he did little in this film to up my opinion of his work. Although saddled with an under written part, he failed to do much with what he was given and I never had any real reason to become emotionally involved with him. Over the years, many actors, from Jimmy Stewart to Gregory Peck to Joseph Cotton have played Americans caught up in intrigue in a foreign land and made us feel much more for them. Hanks went nowhere in my view. Audrey Tautou, not my favorite French actress by a long way, was also a little wooden.
Finally, there is the controversial content of this film, which does deserve being addressed. You would have to have just emerged from a time capsule if you didn't already know the "secret" before you watched this movie. So this was a film about process --how the mystery unfolds and how the protagonists go about solving it. And the only part of that mystery we didn't know in advance was the role Audrey Tautou played in it and I guessed her hidden significance almost immediately.
Which leads us to the theology. There was little in this particular theory of Christianity that I had not heard before, even though I have not read the book.
Yet I can understand how Christians would be offended by this one, since the basic premise implies Jesus was NOT god after all. But why his "marrying" or even just having dated Mary Magdalene would prove he was not god is never really explained. If you believe in the concept of god, then god could probably marry anyone he wanted. He could probably set the rules, too. ( "No, I am not helping with the dishes or taking out the garbage and if I want to go out one night a week with my buddies...." Well, you get it.) Also of concern to me is the number of murders churchmen are seemingly willing to commit here and who is behind them. The film seems to say they are the work of a "rogue" group of clerics within the church. Oh, yeah, we've heard about those Black Ops groups before. And I assume their role is to give the Vatican plausible deniability
Lastly, and this is the part that bothers me the most,is the sort of feel good ending dreamed up here, an ending that takes great pains not to come down on either side of the theological argument. Was Christ god or not? Tom Hanks' character tells us it doesn't matter, because he was a great profit no matter what. Hello? Try telling a couple of billion Christians it doesn't matter. Hell, tell Pat Robertson, Jerry Farwell, Doctor James Dobson and the rest of the Looney tunes who populate the airwaves that Christ was actually NOT god after all. Oops, our bad, they will say. All you guys we condemned to hell. You can come back up now.
Overall this one makes for some good moments, but it is not a movie you want to examine too closely, when unfortunately, its premise requires, no virtually commands close scrutiny.
A marginal thumbs up, but more for the direction than any other element.