So Dark, The Ron Film, Man

Rating: 3/10 (20 May 2006)

I actually wasn't interested in rushing to catch this movie at all until the critics posted their reviews and I saw that they were nearly all bad. Then I found myself curious - just how bad can it be, I asked myself (switching the letters of the words around to form an anagram, of course). The answer: purdy dern bad. And even worse, it's boring. And long. Much, MUCH too long.
It starts off in a cheesy manner and proceeds to get even cheesier as it goes on, and make no mistake - go on, it does. There is not one character that breathed as flesh and blood except for Ian McKellan's Sir Leigh Teabag - I mean Teabing - who stole the picture without any effort whatsoever on his part.
The problem starts with the script, which is dreary and uninspired in every possible way. Add to that Ron Howard's yawn-inducing pacing (and I use that word lightly), the trying-to-pump-drama-into-a-tediously-overwrought-storyline, aka 'The Plot', and you've got a turkey on your hands the size of the west wing of the Louvre.
Hanks' only 'good' line comes early on, when Audrey Tautou, whom I usually love but who comes off like a wooden prop here, shows him the hidden message on the Mona Lisa, 'So Dark The Con Of Man,' to which he replies, "It doesn't say that!" (I thought this was a good line, anyway.)
I was thinking while I was watching it, in an effort to stay awake, that the film would have been a helluva lot more fun if, say, Paul Giamatti had been playing Robert Langdon. And maybe they could've gotten, say, Kate Winslet to play Sophie, or perhaps Giamatti's co-star from Howard's previous film, So Dark The Cinderella Man, Renee Zellweger. I bet she could pull off a French accent.