Caught a screening of the Da Vinci Code over the weekend. (By the way, I just had a very hard time stopping myself from typing The Vinci Code.) It was a heavy-handed affair, with poor pacing and flat acting from everyone not named Ian McKellan. (I would go so far as to say that Tom Hanks dialed into some rarified late-era Robert DeNiro territory with this performance, the whole thing was so thoroughly mailed in.) But that doesn't really bother me–all of these are the sort of ho-hum failures that 99% of modern movies have. The biggest irritant came at the end, in the form of a lecture delivered by Hanks, a discourse mainly on how it doesn't really matter whether Jesus' divinity (the chief focus of the movie) is a myth or not, because really, it's having faith in anything at all that is really important. So yeah, it was a tear-jerker alright, although I don't think my eyes were watering for the intended reasons.
It's worth noting that I had not read Dan Brown's novel before seeing this one, although I could easily see how this a story would be better suited to a subtler medium.
