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"Da Vinci Code" fails to impress

CANNES (France): Early critics seemed happy to try to break ``The Da Vinci Code.''

Reaction ranged from half-hearted admiration to boredom to derision among journalists at the first press screening of the Ron Howard-Tom Hanks blockbuster in waiting, premiering on Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival and opening worldwide through Friday.

```Da Vinci' never rises to the level of a guilty pleasure. Too much guilt. Not enough pleasure,'' wrote critic Kirk Honeycutt in the trade paper The Hollywood Reporter.

"Cursory and rushed"

Associated Press critic Christy Lemire found the movie ``cursory and rushed. ... As sturdy and versatile an actor as Hanks can be, he can't work miracles when he's got nothing to work with.''

Laughter rippled through the theatre near the end of the film at the Cannes press screening on Tuesday night when Mr. Hanks' character, symbologist Robert Langdon, reveals a key secret to co-star Audrey Tautou with ponderous melodrama.

From then on, critics who had sat largely in polite silence for more than two hours tittered at will as the final scenes played out. ``It's not a good sign when your film's big revelatory moment is greeted with laughter,'' wrote Stephen Schaefer, a film writer for The Boston Herald.

Given the nature of the revelation, it necessarily was a line of dialogue loaded with dramatic heft, Mr. Hanks said.

``It is in some ways perhaps the fulcrum of the movie,'' Mr. Hanks said at a news conference before the film's evening premiere. Some critics found the weight of screenwriter Akiva Goldsman's script too heavy to bear, saying Langdon's lengthy asides on religious and cultural icons choked the story's suspense. In Daily Variety, critic Todd McCarthy called ``The Da Vinci Code'' a ``stodgy, grim thing ...

``Sitting through all the verbose explanations and speculation about symbols, codes and covert messages in art, it is impossible to believe that, had the novel never existed, such a script would ever have been considered by a Hollywood studio,'' Mr. McCarthy wrote. — AP

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