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It may be less history than hokum, but it’s a searching product of the feminist era, when even many true believers have grown weary of the church as an instrument of moral reprimand and male dominion. As a novel, The Da Vinci Code has a resonance that lingers. It’s there only in Ian McKellen’s playful, crusty turn as Leigh Teabing, the scholar who hobbles around on twin canes, spouting happy rhetoric about the meaning of the Grail. But what we want from a film of The Da Vinci Code is the fervor of belief. Yes, a soupçon of research reveals that the Priory of Sion is a hoax invented in 1956, and surely it can’t be proved that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were ever intimate (though Martin Luther believed so). This is a sop to the film’s critics (i.e., the Catholic Church), but it feels cautious, anti-dramatic. He uses cheesy digitized flashbacks, rarely trusting the dialogue to evoke history, and he seems faintly rushed and embarrassed each time the movie grows talky, as if he were worried that the breathless theology wouldn’t hold us.Ī crucial change from the book is that Langdon has been made into a skeptic, a fellow who doesn’t necessarily buy that official Christianity is a lie. It’s a challenge, to be sure, to cram Brown’s litany of signs and symbols, his intricate meditations, into a two-and-a-half-hour film, but Howard, working from Akiva Goldsman’s script, fails to build intellectual excitement into the quest. The surprise, and disappointment, of The Da Vinci Code is how slipshod and hokey the religious detective story now seems. It’s no surprise that Howard plays up the thriller mechanics, which already felt like a movie on the page - the escapes and showdowns, the creepy stalker violence of Silas (Paul Bettany), a self-flagellating albino monk hitman who represents Opus Dei, the Catholic sect that’s portrayed as intent on destroying the hidden revelations of its faith. As a novel, The Da Vinci Code hung speculative theology on a routine, if page-turningly rendered, cloak-and-dagger chase plot.