One that features Tom Hanks earnestly looking into the camera to declare “I need to get to a library!” as the music swells. And all of that cacophonous noise was over… a pretty middle-of-the-road adventure movie. Protests occurred at theaters throughout the U.S., while other international markets banned it outright.
How could something that high-handed live up to that kind of hype?Īs a splashy Hollywood version of Dan Brown’s most popular potboiler, The Da Vinci Code premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and was the subject of countless faux-examinations about early Christianity on the cable news circuit-as well as the object of ire for some modern Christians’ growing need for perpetual outrage. All the while, its rollout suggested it had aspirations to be an awards contender.
It was an adaptation of the biggest literary phenomenon of the decade not starring Harry Potter, and it was arriving in cinemas with the kind of media frenzy usually reserved for Star Wars.
When Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code took the world by storm in 2006, I was far from being a professional critic, but I could still be highly critical of something like this.