A waste of time and money

Rating: 1/10 (29 May 2006)

Tom Hanks should get an Oscar for pretending he was in a movie. I can't believe this dull turkey is still selling out. It can't possibly be getting good word of mouth. Maybe it's okay for someone who hasn't read the book and doesn't know what is going to happen. Maybe finding out what's going to happen is reward enough. But for someone who has read the book, there are no other attractions to the film. There is no serious excitement, suspense, emotion, love interest, action, cinematography, acting, social message, or anything else that makes a movie worth lining up for. It might have been more interesting if they had concentrated on the historical events leading up to the present and made it a saga of the activities of the Roman Catholic church from the time of Constantine, through the Holy Roman Empire, then the Crusades, then the plague, then the renaissance, then the industrial age, and finally the last century. If they had done that, with lots of context and verisimilitude, then it might have been intriguing and exciting. As it turns out, the flash backs were low-budget scenes like the kind you see in cheesy History Channel documentaries. Maybe I'm disappointed because I had just seen Sir Ian in X-Men, and I expected that anything he would do with Tom Hanks would have to be even better. Well, I guess even Opie is entitled to sleep walk through a certain percentage of projects. Let's just hope he takes Viagra and not Ambien for the next one.