..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

WEEK SIX
So Dark The Cannes Of Ron

Oh how I wanted to be able to thumb my nose at the critics in Cannes who were so fast and furious in ripping into The Da Vinci Code just yesterday. There was a relentlessness and a competitiveness about who would be the first to shred the film that seemed unseemly and unnecessarily aggressive.

But alas, the reviews that came out yesterday were all too kind.

I never read The Da Vinci Code. And I think it would have done the movie well to have had some voices involved that never read The Da Vinci Code. If you make a movie with a target of hitting readers of a popular book and your business needs will be satisfied by that film being seen in theaters by fewer than 50% of the book buyers, you are in good shape. If you need more tickets sold than that, you need to make a movie first and a movie of a book second.

People who have read the book have told me that they aren't satisfied either. But I will let them speak for themselves.

For me, the movie was, simply, a disaster. I didn't care about the characters. I swerved between being overwhelmed by the endless expositional dialogue and shocked by how obvious certain story choices were. There is a point where Audrey Tautou's Sophie Neveu says, "How was I supposed to figure all this out?" And she spoke for all of us.

It's not easy to make an albino monk who self flagellates buck naked and has glow-in-the-dark eyes into a boring, unmotivated nothing. But they do it.

Sir Ian Exposition has been the bright spot in the negative reviews and understandably, as he shows just how charming an actor he can be even as he has to spit out reams of horrible, flat, exposition that is impossible to follow even if you love every twinkle that emerges from his eyes.

Jean Reno's Bezu Fache is a cardboard cutout who, like so many of the secondary characters, presents at someone who might be interesting, only to be overwhelmed by just how unimportant a role their character ends up playing.

Perhaps the most painful small role in the movie is Jurgen Prochnow, who offers an accent that like many of them in the film, is laughable, and then offers us the Mission: Impossible element no one had reason to expect… the secure exit.

But before he gets to "the secure exit," he offers a good example of what is wrong with the movie. In one of the Blue's Clues twists in the film, Hanks & Tautou find Prochnow and an insanely complex safe deposit box… more complex than needs be or makes sense. And while they have a key, they don't have the code. Prochnow intones, "Well, I hope you get it right, because one wrong entry shuts down the system." They guess, based on the one clue that a 7-year-old child would assume was he mysterious answer, and then... there is so much pressure… so much… oh... not so much... the obvious answer was right.

Really, I am being kind by suggesting there is tension. But you can see that tension was the intention. And this is a problem wit the film repeatedly. The movie tells you they are in trouble and then they got out of it without any effort or even any interesting choice. The worst of these causes McKellan to almost wink as he turns to the screen and smirks, "People often don't see what is right in front of them." Unfortunately, I did. (And of course, these quotations are paraphrased.)

But back to the original terrible idea, which is essentially a "get out of tight spot free" card that demands no rhyme or reason, reoccurs later, including when Sir Ian comes up with perhaps the best bad line of the movie, as the police are literally breaking down his front door... "I have a plane." Coming from Magneto, you expect the X-Men jet in the backyard, but instead, he has a car that drives them to a plane. Oy.

Mr. Hanks is badly miscast here, but not for some of the reasons I've seen suggested. The real problem for him is that his character has nothing to do but talk. He doesn't get to charm or be funny. All he does is talk. And playing the stoic intellectual with a claustrophobia issue is not a Tom Hanks role. He would have been better - and I'm not kidding - as the girl. He is a great reactor and to drag him into a world where he has no control and just has to react, he would be great. Not so the still gorgeous, but hopelessly underwritten for Ms. Tautou.

The story, for him, really is a riff on Hitchcock. He is the guy who doesn't quite know what's going on, but is smart enough to step up as the situation demands it. (In this case, he is not the wrong man, but he is an expert in the saga into which he is dragged.) And for it to work, you needed to feel his lack of certainty. Instead, he (and Tautou with him) adapt to being chased and funning and flying and driving recklessly as though it happened every day. No tension. You kind of expect him to say, "but wait a minute!," but he is too busy cleaning up the seventeen tons of exposition that has no emotional weight whatsoever.

Paul Giamatti might have been great in this role. Johnny Depp or Joaquin Phoenix could have done it. Tim Robbins would have been good. Hanks is great when he plays a full person. These other actors are are all strong, styled personalities that turn up even when what is around them is bland. But, of course, no one would have been good with this script.

This may be remembered as one of the worst major movie scripts ever. Really. Not hyperbole. There have been worse. But rarely do you see so much mess made of so much that seems inherently interesting. There is not a single good piece of dialogue I can remember from the film. (The failure of "Poor, poor Poseidon" to register as a laugh line even in a Hollywood crowd tells you how quickly last week's trash gets thrown out.)

But the biggest problem is simply a complete lack of any real tension in the story. Much as in Mission:Impossible 3 (which this film is more like than I care to think about) and Poseidon, there is a lot of representation of tension. There are beats of intense danger and of physical conflict. But there is nothing behind them in any of these films. In the earlier action films, they blow a lot of shit up so you aren't supposed to notice. But here, it is both inexcusable and unrecoverable.

I have no idea how loyal Akiva Goldsman was to the book, but there is no element of the film nearly as bad as the screenplay. Mind you, Goldsman works on a lot of films (he has a producing credit on Poseidon, which surely means he added more dreck there) and this is his eleventh credited screenplay. The previous ten include four of Hollywood's biggest misses ever, Batman Forever, A Time to Kill, Batman & Robin, and Lost In Space. But this film reminds me most of a film that he didn't get screenplay credit on, but was the on set writer and co-producer, Deep Blue Sea. Great commercial idea. Big funky effects. An absolute mess when it came to story and dialogue. Goldsman, with some exceptions, seems to be a screenwriter who thinks like a studio exec. (That is no compliment.) He writes scenes, but forgets that they are part of a whole. In this case, the scenes don't work either, though McExposition saves his ass by making some of the worst marbles in the mouth dialogue work in spite of itself.

The film was not good, but it didn't become painful until it passed the two-hour mark. One reason for this is that even though the film has no real act structure, it felt as though the story was coming to an end, however unsatisfying, at that two hour mark. And then it went on for another 30 minutes.

What happens in those final 30 minutes is, apparently, a variation on the book and I don't want to spoil it. That said, the ultimate moment of the film wants to have it both ways and that couldn't be more infuriating, even for someone like myself who doesn't care a whit about whether the idea of Jesus marrying is well supported or not.

This movie makes clear just what an achievement the Bourne Supremacy movies have been. It's not easy. But it can be done.

Over The Hedge looks like it will be the first major release of the summer to achieve both commercial and at least moderate critical success.

The Da Vinci Code? Zero, zero, zero.

This Week's Box Office Chart

THE BOX OFFICE CHARTS
Week Four - 5/11
Week Four - 5/4
Week Two - 4/20
Week One - 4/13

THE COLUMN
Week Five- 5/11
Week Four - 5/4
Week Three - 4/27
Week Two - 4/20
Week One - 4/13

- Email David Poland