Big, shocking surprise and all, but so say Canadian reviewers of [Leonardo’s] Da Vinca Code as a movie. Amongst many other shortcomings:
Each of the other[ actor]s is required by the script, and by their characters, to spend endless minutes regurgitating the so-called "factual" elements of Brown's book as it pertains to secret societies, despots in the Roman Catholic Church and the "truth" about Christ's marriage to Mary Magdalene.
We won't tell people who have not read Brown's book (and there are some, despite the gigantic sales) what these facts and truths are, but suffice it to say that though they are supposed to be momentous, they come across as deflated bits of religious mythology.
I’ve read several detailed and justly disparaging reviews of the book (which itself reminds me of a copy of MadLib gone a bit... well, you know... mad) but this is the first even slightly detailed assessment before me of how the movie people dealt with this roleplaying nightmare as it turned from paper towards action.
To labour the point a little, the assessment is “badly”.
In fact, considering what a bizarre, sensationalist shot-in-the-dark the book is, it’s kind of lightly amazing that anyone was brave/silly enough to put resources and effort into making it move. I guess that some accountants wrought mightily with the raw figures and hoodwinked a handful of managers with pointless but exciting phrases along the lines of “It’s so huge, it’s just gotta work! We’ll be millionaires!” — and that said managers neglected to point out that they were already billionaires...
So many reviewers speak along much the same disappointed track that I’m afraid assigning blame to one reviewer is not going to be unsustainable: with a few small exceptions, DvC sucks about as much in movie form as it does as [sic] litterature.
So, it’s built on rumours of scandal within one of the world's largest political organisations? Big, fat, hairy deal.
The Roman Kingship has sat through hordes of stuff like massive leadership splits and unwarned massacres of about 70,000 non-member civilians, each event with a great deal more background and action scenes. Plenty of material in just those two (of many Roman and Roman-driven, here Roman/Manchu[Qing]) events with which dodging condemnations like the following would have been trivial:
That said, the movie is slow, rambling and bumbling its way through the story. The characters seem wooden, and the flashbacks, while serving to fill in some of the blanks, appear cheap (though I’m sure they were not).
Then I think back to how bland and over-hyped many modern movies are, and a depressing reality becomes visible: evidently, we’re collectively numb enough to sit through this kind of crud — again and again. Oh, human nature! )-:
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