I loved the book! That's why this movie was a major letdown. Although the acting wasn't necessarily bad, I would say the actors were poorly chosen. I really didn't like the choice of Jean Reno to play the police Captain Fache; as the name is a play on words for the French word fâche, meaning angry. Jean Reno's performance made Fache look like an innocent pawn who really had good intentions after all (which was not the case in the book). The only really fitting actor was Ian McKellen, playing the cocky British Sir Leigh Teabing. In fact, I believe that McKellen's performance was one of the main reasons why I was able to stomach this movie; although his lines were not true to the book, they were true to the character, and rather funny too. Although Paul Bettany's Silas the Albino was scary and menacing, he didn't seem like the albino the book described him as (he didn't 'look' the part). I must say, The Da Vinci Code was very different from the original book. It begins with the murder of the Louvre museum art curator, Jacques Saunière (Jean-Pierre Marielle). While looking through Saunière's daily planner, the DCPJ (Direction Centrale Police Judiciaire, or Judicial Police) notices that the murdered senior had a meeting with an American history professor named Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks). What's mysterious about all this is that the dead curator used the last minutes of his life (he was shot in the stomach and died slowly from his own stomach acids, as explained in the book) to leave a set of mysterious clues and a note saying, 'P.S. Find Robert Langdon'. Fache takes this information as an act of marking Langdon as the killer, and brings Langdon in to set him up. Fortunately, Saunière's granddaughter, Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), intercepts the message and decodes its personal meaning, and comes to Langdon's aid. In order to escape the clutches of Fache and his obedient assistant, Lt. Collet (Etienne Chicot), Langdon and Neveu take their knowledge and the crime scene artifacts (strange clues about... something) to Sir Leigh Teabing. There, they realize that Saunière was a grand master in a secret society called the Priory of Sion and was killed guarding the secrets of the whereabouts of the holy grail. And, as you have probably come to understand by now, the holy grail is not a cup, but rather the sarcophagus of Mary Magdalene, Jesus's wife (wow, a conspiracy!) and bearer of his only child. Together, the three work on solving the trail of clues and riddles as they find themselves on a frantic grail quest. History repeats itself as members of the Church plot to bring down Langdon and co. and destroy the grail (because it could cause many followers to lose faith in Christianity). The founder of a sect called Opus Dei, Bishop Aringarosa (Alfred Molina) and his faithful albino servant, Silas, receive information from an anonymous stranger named 'the Teacher', and will stop at nothing to locate and destroy the grail. The Teacher seems to have eyes everywhere; will Langdon, Teabing, and Sophie prevail? Did Saunière and his three sénéchaux (the top three officers in the Priory who serve under the Grand Master) die in vain? You should probably just read the book. I think that this movie assumes that the viewer has read the book, and spends more time giving us new information instead of dwelling on things that you would have picked up by reading. Many scenes and flashbacks that were mentioned in the book were not detailed at all in the movie, and I'm sure that if someone hasn't 'done their homework', they won't understand what's going on in the film. Since this is an adaptation of a deep, thoughtful book, there is no way to show what a person is thinking. In fact, to summarize and shorten the film, many things were left out, and many things were added in. Maybe this is more of an 'expansion pack' (The Da Vinci Code: Gold Edition, maybe?) because it has all these extra features that just scream, 'I didn't think of that while I was writing the book, but better now than never'. That's why there are many times where characters will come to random conclusions without any train of thought. Also, I felt the movie went fairly fast, and could be considered more of a 'tribute' than a real movie with a strong plot. Am I the only one who got the impression that this was more of a Scooby Doo mystery than a timeless feud? Even so, it was amazing to me how a fiction film (or book, for that matter) could be so strangely fitting with history? After seeing/reading The Da Vinci Code, I sat there and wondered to myself, 'Is it possible?' According to this, anything's possible; which is why you should give this movie a chance, maybe you'll love it!
