When the book is better than the movie and the book wasn’t very good to begin with, you have a problem on your hands. If there was anything that kept me from abandoning Dan Brown’s amateurishly written thriller, it was the continual promise of another word puzzle being solved around the corner. Stripped of those enticing carrots – as any film version of The Da Vinci Code inherently will be for its millions of readers – the movie is a ponderous bore. I’ve played games of Scrabble that were more gripping than this. With lifeless performances from Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou as Boggle-heads trying to solve the millennia-old mystery of the Holy Grail.
