Opus Dei Did It

...So instead of making a crackling thriller that would allow his leading actor Tom Hanks to show off his mischievous way with a one-liner, he has collaborated with screenwriter Akiva Goldsman on a mystery pockmarked and mottled by absurd coincidences that seem all the more glaring because the tone here is so ridiculously solemn...

...The Da Vinci Code isn't much, but moviegoing beggars can't be choosers...

...In those books, the title character solves an unsolvable mystery on the basis of almost no information, at which point the narrator asks readers: How did Encyclopedia Brown know...

...Then the professor figures out that Mary Magdalene's tomb is in the basement of the Louvre...

...But then the Swiss banker tries to steal the attaché case...

...But the girl cop gives the albino a clop and he's out on the floor, which seems very convenient, considering that he's the world's most dangerous and efficient assassin...

...The Da Vinci Code is a very playful book, which is what people love about it...

...More French cops show up, but the rich English guy has already stashed the professor, the cute cop, and the albino on a plane to London...

...When the book sorts through the logical way Encyclopedia Brown figured out the mystery, it still seems impossible a little boy, an adult, or even Sherlock Holmes, could have figured it out...

...And the spirit of play is exactly what is missing from Ron Howard's movie...

...Still, the movie's box-office bonanza its first weekend wasn't solely due to the book's popularity...

...Howard is one of the few really good American movie directors now working, but despite his long career in situation comedy, he doesn't have much of a sense of humor left...

...Then it turns out that the albino is secretly working for the English guy, even though the albino doesn't know it because he thinks he's working for Opus Dei...

...Oh, and the professor is afraid of enclosed spaces because he fell down a well once when he was a boy...

...grandchild...

...Brown's Da Vinci Code has been so astoundingly popular because it's really a series of interlocking puzzles in prose—a Sodoku game in the form of a novel...

...But then it turns out that he didn't destroy it at all, and wouldn't you know it, the cute French cop turns out to be Jesus's great-great-great-etc...

...And she's just like anybody's grandchild, because not once has she gone to visit Him...

...He seems to have taken The Da Vinci Code seriously as a shocking exposé of the "greatest cover-up in human history...

...by JOHN PODHORETZ If you would like to save two-and-a-half hours of your life, read the next four paragraphs and you will be able to avoid the endlessly turgid film version of The Da Vinci Code while still being able to converse knowledge-ably about it at outdoor barbecues and formal functions...

...With Tom Hanks as a detective, and the great old ham Ian McKellen as his sidekick, even a dud like The Da Vinci Code is going to continue to draw audiences with no interest in comic book heroes or animated squirrels raiding supermarkets...

...So there's this guy being chased by an albino through the Louvre at night...

...There's even a 15th-century combination lock that contains a map...

...the guy lays himself out, spread-eagled, on the floor and writes something in invisible ink on that same floor about a professor of "religious symbol-ogy" at Harvard...

...The end...

...But it seems hard to believe this journeyman novelist actually thought anyone would take his cock-and-bull story seriously, especially since his chosen vehicle for revolutionary reformation is an adult version of one of those Encyclopedia Brown stories for preteen boys...

...It's laden with riddles, anagrams, and clues hidden inside Leonardo's paintings...

...Fortunately, they bonk him on the head, steal his armored truck, and end up in a villa with a very rich English guy on crutches who tells them that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a kid and the Roman Catholic Church knows it and has been covering it up for nearly two millennia...

...For good or ill, The Da Vinci Code is the first highbudget, big-star murder mystery to be released in years...

...There's no way on earth that these bits of information could all come together so neatly in just 24 hours to blow the lid off the Catholic Church, particularly considering how much of it is in code...

...After he gets shot by the albino, who is a monk in his spare time, John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is the WEEKLY STANDARD's movie critic and author of Can She Be Stopped...

...The professor tricks the English guy by seeming to destroy the key piece of evidence in the Jesus-Mary cover-up...

...Just then the albino shows up to kill all of them...

...A cute French cop figures out that the professor is getting set up, and, after a brief visit to the Mona Lisa, helps him hightail it out of the Louvre into a Swiss bank, where they get an attaché case and free ride out of the bank into the woods...

...It may be true that Brown used the conspiracy-thriller form as a vehicle to try to rewrite all of Christian history, as some distressed columnists have suggested over the past few weeks as the movie's opening weighed heavily on their minds...

...Once a staple of the cinema, the murder mystery has vanished from the big screen and taken up permanent residence on television in venues as various as the ghoulish CSI and the witty Monk...

...The French police summon the professor, who happens to be in Paris for a book tour because you know Harvard professors of religious symbolo-gy often make a stop in Paris on their book tours...

...The movie is faithful to Dan Brown's hugely successful novel in every way except for the one that matters...