So Dull the Con of Man

When I heard that Ron Howard was going to direct The Da Vinci Code, I didn’t give it a second thought — he is, as everyone knows, an award-winning director. But having now seen the film, I have to wonder how it happened that Howard was picked for the job; his résumé, after all, doesn’t have much in the way of thrillers, and boy was that fact evident today.

Don’t get me wrong — Howard and the cast were certainly great in other movies, but the film version of The Da Vinci Code, unlike the novel, seems to assume interest and suspense without bothering to build them. And without the suspense, Dan Brown’s previously inflammatory conspiracy theory has little to offer beyond some very hokey dialog and laughably spurious history.

Even Freud would concede that sometimes a triangle is just a triangle