The Da Vinci Code

Several buildings you watch in Ron Howard’s adaptation are not the buildings you think. The Louvre granted access, but a replica Mona Lisa stood in because the real canvas could not be lit. Westminster Abbey refused outright, so those passages were shot in Lincoln and Winchester cathedrals, and when Saint-Sulpice shut its doors the interior was rebuilt digitally in post. Anyone treating it as a tour of Paris and London should know that in advance. The longest single stretch of these one hundred and forty nine minutes is a lecture, not a chase. Midway through, Teabing delivers the grail history as though writing on a blackboard, explaining the puzzle to the audience rather than letting it be discovered. Tom Hanks plays Langdon deliberately level and unreactive, leaving Ian McKellen to carry the energy, and he arrives only once the picture is half over. The Cannes press screening was cool, with the Hollywood Reporter critic calling Hanks remote and even wooden. It still took over seven hundred million dollars worldwide and drew weeks of protest from religious groups. Who it’s for: anyone untroubled that a grail lecture outlasts the pursuit and that half these buildings stand in for others. Who it’s not for: anyone likely to mistake its history for scholarship, or needing momentum after the opening.