FILM: The Da Vinci Code

Caught The Da Vinci Code movie last night. It would be an over-statement to tell it a thriller. I was not thrilled. Or excited or even intrigued by the plot.

In fact, it insults the intelligence of the audience. But if The Da Vinci Code does become the biggest box-office hit of the year, then to paraphrase JM, the people are getting what they deserve.

The movie opens on what is obviously lazy plotting and no research. A murder has occurred in the Louvre. We see the man, Jacques Sauniere, shot in the stomache by Silas (Paul Bettany playing a tortured, spaced-out albino psychopath). The police detective Bezu Fache (Jean Reno) asks for Professor Robert Langdon's (Tom Hanks in a bad haircut) assistance in the investigation. Jean Reno, who is so cool in Leon, just walks around, breathes a little and talk a bit in this movie.

When we see the naked body of Sauniere laid out in the pattern of Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, a pentagram drawn in blood on his chest. Langdon asks, who did it to him? Fair question, I would think.

"He did it to himself," answered Fache.

Huh?

We are the generation brought up on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. And first rule of a murder investigation: preserve the crime scene.

Query: Are we to believe that Fache can just bring in a stranger (and a murder suspect at that) into the crime scene with a dead body?

Bezu Fache supposedly cleared off some of the text Sauniere wrote in ultraviolet marker before his death.

Query: Is Fache allowed to tamper with a crime scene before the body has been removed?

Also, we are supposed to suspend our disbelief that:

1. Sauniere, after being shot in the stomache - has the time and strength to walk around the Louvre writing cryptic anagrams with a ultra-violet marker?
2. Sauniere is the kind of man who just happens to carry a ultra-violet marker with him everywhere he goes?
3. After his ultra-violet graffiti, Sauniere proceeds to strip naked, use his own blood to draw a pentagram on his chest, before lying down to die.
4. Sophie Neveu, having never met Robert Langdon or Fache, knows Fache is trying to frame Langdon for the murder of Sauniere.
5. Sophie Neveu never once suspect Langdon of the murder of her grandfather

A critic wrote that Akiva Goldman actually improved on Dan Brown's novel. This scares me and re-affirms my decision to stop reading after the first page. I gave away my copy of The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons to a colleague and left her these parting words, "I don't want them to come back."