The Da Vinci Coma

By RICHARD CORLISS

Everybody but Dan Brown knows that The Da Vinci Code is not a great book; at best it's a great read. But for all the novel's thriller tropes, its chases among chalices and cilices, the publishing phenomenon of the decade is a very bookish book. The games Brown plays are essentially literary: anagrams and hexagrams, fun with the Fibonacci Sequence. Those riddles are best savored by readers with a long night or a long flight ahead of them.

They are not, however, intrinsically visual or dramatic. To make a real movie out of The Da Vinci Code, rather than an audio CD or a "special illustrated edition" (which have been done), requires a rethinking of the book. Or at least a thinking. Instead, director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman pounded out a faithful synopsis and filmed it. The result is a work that is politically brave, for a mainstream movie, and artistically stodgy.

The plot--about the pursuit of a Harvard professor (Tom Hanks) and a French policewoman (Audrey Tautou) by a devout, albino hit man (Paul Bettany) and rival gangs of learned loonies, all in search of Christ's Holy Grail--has some superficial bustle, but essentially it's a course in speculative religious and art history. Somebody talks, the others listen. Those lectures give most of the actors little to do. Ian McKellen, as a crotchety charmer, fares best, because he does most of the talking. Bettany, finding poignancy in murder and masochism, comes in second.

The bravery? Filming and financing what, if the story is taken seriously, is a corrosive challenge to Christianity. But having made the bold decision to film the novel, Howard hasn't the energy to slap the thing to life. He's like a guide on one of the countless Da Vinci Code tours of Paris or London, doing it by rote, letting the film hobble to its climax with still more exposition. Good movies are show-and-tell; this one is all-tell, no-show.