DOWN IN FRONT: The Da Vinci Code

by Dan Dunkle

     “The Da Vinci Code” is like going to that class in college that has the really funny, witty professor who cracks a lot of jokes and who you eventually come to suspect is full of crap.

     It’s fun as college classes go, but it’s not quite fun enough when you consider the fact that it’s a MOVIE!

     The plot is pretty complicated, and I normally start to space out during movies with complicated plots.

     Tom Hanks plays Robert Langdon who is an expert on religion, symbols and history. He’s clearly too busy reading and learning stuff to find a proper hairdresser. While on a lecture tour in Paris where he is playing the role of the witty professor, he is called in to help in the investigation of a bizarre murder at the Louvre (You know, the fancy museum with all of those famous pictures including the Mona Lisa, and the one by that guy that your college roommate had a poster of, and dogs playing poker -- all the good stuff).

     As happens in movies, he ends up on the run with a woman, Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) being chased by police and some crazy, pigment-challenged monk named Silas (Paul Bettany). It’s a funny coincidence that people who end up being key figures in movies involving religious mysteries always have these biblical, gothic-sounding names like Silas or Gabriel. You never have a movie about a mysterious religious order featuring a murderous monk named Fred or Joe-Bob. Just like the parents of the antichrist in the Omen movies, who are supposedly oblivious of the fact that their child is the son of Satan, just happen to pick Damien out of their handy-dandy baby name book.

     It turns out, as the movie progresses that there’s this huge conspiracy to hide the “truth” that Jesus supposedly was married to Mary Magdalene and had children. Wow!

     It also turns out that everyone is involved in this conspiracy. I mean everyone. You’ve got your Knights of the Crusades, some old dead pagan Roman Caesar, the secret order of whosy-whatsit, the other secret order that hates the whosy-whatsits, the Masons, the Elks Lodge, the Girl Scouts. Even Tom Hanks’ hairdresser is in on it. Everyone somehow got together in top secret and over a period of multiple centuries to bring about the hiring of an insane, self-abusing monk to kill the guy with the thing in the museum. Or something like that.

     They did it all because if the secret gets out it will just rip apart the very fabric of our everything and so on.

     So, about 20 minutes into Ian McKellen’s dissertation on what’s really going on in the painting of “The Last Supper,” it occurred to me that they had gotten learning into my movie. I didn’t want to learn. I wanted to be entertained, especially when what I was learning was probably not true or in any way useful. So I decided I was bored.

     However, I thought, if they can come up with some mind-blowing, surprise ending I could still come out of this saying I had fun. For me, just keeping it real, the ending was kind of anticlimactic.

     I’m surprised because Tom Hanks and director Ron Howard usually don’t let me down.

     The summer movie season, despite the hype, really hasn’t started yet. I think it will truly get going with movies like “X-Men” and the new “Pirates of the Caribbean” flick.