An extra star is earned by Paul Bettany and Ian McKellen (as the nutty monk and the wealthy fruitcake respectively), who somehow manage to keep the film from lurching completely to a halt. Robert Langdon 3-Movie Set - The Da Vinci Code / Angels & Demons / Inferno (DVD, Boxed set) / Actor: Tom Hanks / Actor: Audrey Tautou / Actor: Ian McKellen. Director Ron Howard relentlessly patronises his audience with CGI flashbacks to The World Of Ancient History, and the whole thing goes on for hours and hours. Combine the film's huge worldwide box-office take with over 100 million copies of Dan Brown's book sold, and The Da Vinci Code has clearly made the leap from pop-culture hit to a certifiable franchise. At one point, they get saved by a pigeon. Critics and controversy aside, The Da Vinci Code is a verifiable blockbuster. The plotting, which seemed endearingly silly on the page, is snortingly preposterous on screen: our heroes tumble po-faced from peril to peril with insane regularity. "THE WHOLE THING GOES ON FOR HOURS AND HOURS" Hanks looks and performs like a lump of dough in a wig. Tautou is very, very bad, and clearly uncomfortable. It just lies there on the screen like a $100 million mattress. For all the prestige production values and A-list stars, The Da Vinci Code is practically catatonic. By that reckoning, Da Vinci ought to be an excellent film, since the prose is awful and the plot is tremendous. It is a truism that good books make bad films, and vice versa. Yes, it's The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's hungry monster of a bestseller, adapted for the silver screen complete with albino monks and cranky French detectives.
Ultimately, THE DA VINCI CODE is a thoughtful action film, with a refreshingly clear-eyed approach to world history that may scandalize the close. Following a byzantine trail of clues, they gradually uncover a massive religious conspiracy. The Da Vinci Code (DVD) Veteran actor Tom Hanks stars as professor Robert Langdon, whose Parisian lecture tour on feminine symbolism gets disrupted when he's implicated in a murder at the Louvre. Stop me if you've heard this one before: when a curator at the Louvre is murdered, it's up to grumpy professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and perky cryptologist Sophie Neveau (Audrey Tautou) to solve the mystery.