If the dusty old knight who instructed Indiana Jones to “choose wisely” in The Last Crusade ever picked up a copy of The Da Vinci Code (now, thanks to Ron Howard, he can watch the film instead) he would no doubt be incensed to discover how the Holy Grail is being represented nowadays.  Back in older, less complicated times it was simply imagined as a cup of magical, youth-replenishing liquid; in the throes of Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel it is now the corpse, or what is left of it, of Mary Magdalene.    

A flog of back-story semantics justify this bizarre concept and eventually lull the audience into a phoney sense of understanding.  But cut to the bone the vague premise behind The Da Vinci Code runs something like this: a wine glass, if you look at it the right way, can resemble an upside-down triangle.  An upside-down triangle, if you look at it while envisioning, say, a woman’s figure, can resemble a part of the female anatomy.  Assuming that logic is infallible (which, of course, it isn't) the Holy Grail was never a delicious drink but in fact the womb of a person – a body potentially capable of proving that Jesus Christ was mortal, had a wife and kids and paid his taxes just like the rest of us.  Or something like that. 

Like that image of Nicholas Cage peering at the eye of the sphinx on an American one dollar bill in National Treasure, much of The Da Vinci Code appears to be built around a similar logic: take a familiar emblem - something simple like a note or a famous painting or a well known mathematics sequence - and turn it on its head for narrative potential.  Paintings, engravings, religious motifs; synagogues, museums, town squares; hidden maps, cryptic clues, obscure red herrings - a veritable shopping list of postcards and deviations.  Howard flies through them blindingly and the film at all times seems weirdly dislocated, as if the rapid shifts in environment were fracturing the contours of the story itself.  

All the trimmings of spy-movie intrigue minus the cocktails and the booty are thrown into the pot: bluff, double cross, crime, murder, surprise villains, secret societies, nefarious conspiracies.  It sure looks like the catholic church are partying on nowadays.  They're probably hoping the film might procure them some more worshippers, but I wonder how many die hard fans of the movie might straggle into Sunday morning congregation merely in the hope of observing something dramatic.  Perhaps it’s time the church considers commissioning Dan Brown to write a sermon or two.  

Tom Hanks, who by now can sniff out high-profile projects like some people can smell impending rain, maintains a stolid, faintly coloured glare as the impossibly well versed Robert Langdon, who at all times looks like a man deserving of a cattle prodder to buzz some activity into him. 

Langdon is an academic extraordinarily knowledgeable of western religion, but he doesn't stride like a believer: his disposition reeks of middlebrow pluralist mentality, a central, inoffensive PC presence that hovers placidly between scientific and spiritual and refuses to settle on either.  Hanks talks at length but reveals precious little about his character; his job is to wrap his mouth around wordy fact-chasing monologues without biting his tongue or making any sudden movements.  His partner is crime is the bubbly Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) and the person who chases them across the world is a zealous sicko known only as Silas, who seems more like a Sith than a member of the church and is played by a pale, pasty, psychotically albino looking Peal Bettany.  Albino lobbying groups in American have, by the way, already registered their outrage.    

Ian McKellen, who now seems to have total free-range on every brilliant-old-man-in-a-blockbuster role in Hollywood, bursts on the scene about halfway through and adds a splash of colour before quickly nudged into his spot as mumbling mouth #2.  Together Hanks and McKellen talk up a storm, Audrey Tautou races to keep up, Paul Bettany snarls and cusses in their general direction and Jean Reno, playing yet another tough-guy cop, pieces together the clues twenty minutes behind everybody else.   

Hanks is flat as Langdon and jerked into oafish nonchalance – he looks like he’s been specifically instructed not to act too hard.  The script constantly jerks him between locations, throwing him into all sorts of dramatic situations, and by the end of all these tumultuous journeys we’ve learned a chunk of things from Langdon and practically nothing about him, beyond simple caricatures (i.e. claustrophobia brought upon by a traumatic childhood experience).  A similar thing could be said about Ron Howard: prolific he may be, but it’s very difficult to extrapolate from his work any tangible sense of who the man behind the lens really is.  

In Howard's hands The Da Vinci Code plays like video game theology: religion waxed blockbuster style, full of THX thumping strings and gimmicky special effects. Skeptics and Da Vinci non-believers may take solace in the knowledge that a sequel isn’t likely to be on the books any time soon, but in the unlikely event of that production getting the green light I have a golden pitch ready for the producers: why not make Tom Hanks' new nemesis the "choose wisely" knight from The Last Crusade?  The knight could launch a fiery monologue about how the Holy Grail is, was, and shall always be cup and liquid before invariably being beaten down by a Robert Langdon-style assault of spiralling logic and complicated sounding words. 

The knight, after enduring Langdon's there-is-no-grail, it's-actually-a-woman and what-you-drank-was-probably-poison spiel could inquire, quite sedately, why it is then that his family have remained sanctioned at a bogus post for umpteen generations.  Unsatisfied by Hanks' blabbering retort the knight then happily announces the departure of his head from its resting point (Tom's first and potentially Oscar winning head-roll).

The poster tagline writes itself: He Chose Poorly.