The Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown's frontal assault on the church is softened in Ron Howard's film | Andrew Coffin

If polls are taken of audiences leaving The Da Vinci Code (and they probably will be), one suspects that the results will be similar to polls conducted on audiences leaving Fahrenheit 9/11: It preaches to the choir.

Ron Howard's film version of Dan Brown's bestselling novel provides a comfortable, if remarkably flimsy, buttress for viewers looking for reasons to reject the gospel, and likely fails to impact many others. Just as in Mr. Brown's book, the movie follows Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and French police cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) through a maze of deceptions involving codes, murder, secret Catholic orders, Leonardo Da Vinci, and the deity of Christ.

The Da Vinci Code adheres with moderate faithfulness to the plot of Mr. Brown's novel but is not a particularly thrilling film adaptation of a book that is often described as a "page-turner." Until it becomes unbearably talky and self-important about two-thirds of the way through, the book succeeds on the strength of a repetitive but absorbing pattern of puzzle/clue, puzzle/clue, divided into short, revealing chapters. Mr. Brown's massive web of intrigue encompasses everything from the Knights Templar and Holy Grail to Friday the 13th and Disney movies (Christians always knew they were evil, right?).