50 shades of brown

Let me be the first to express any amount of delight that Ron Howard and Tom Hanks might finally stop adapting Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon yarns into detective procedurals. They’re snappy page-turners but on screen they’re about as punchy as Dora the Explorer.

To wit: Langdon (played by Hanks) is a symbologist who has a massive faculty for puzzles and everybody seems to rely on him whenever something goes wrong. The art director at the Louvre is murdered. Call Langdon to solve the mystery and how it connects with Jesus Christ. A physicist at CERN meets the same fate. Langdon can tell you how the Illuminati is involved in using God particles to destroy the Vatican. And now here in this infernal disaster, a genius billionaire geneticist (the very watchable Ben Foster as Bertrand Zobrist) kills himself but only after setting up a device to release a specially designed virus upon the world.

I’m sure that none of you would be interested in any of these tales for their intricate character development or sophisticated story structure. Let’s be clear on that point: Brown’s books are so much about plot that they might as well be connect the dots. Langdon is meant to be some kind of modern-day Indiana Jones with more intricate knowledge of human history along the obscure minutiae of art and religion.

Zobrist has decided that people are the plague that is slowly destroying the planet, so he creates an actual plague to wipe them out. This is the science version of the same plot that we saw last year in Kingsmen. While the geneticist is pretty smart in some ways, somehow he’s not smart enough to just release the virus immediately. Somehow, he doesn’t even wipe clean all of the clues and tracks for someone like Langdon to stop it with the help of the World Health Organization. Somehow, he even leaves a whole lot of extra clues just to make sure there’s a big ‘X’ marked on the map for people to race to.

Screenwriter David Koepp is one of my fave scribes but there’s only so much greatness that can be added to such atrocious source material. You want Dante’s Inferno? Well, expect an infernally banal guided tour through Florence, Venice and Istanbul but without so much of the sightseeing.

This movie and its novel are just as bad as 50 Shades of Grey on screen and in print. Someone must stop this madness … this boring, sad madness. Howard is an accomplished director of mostly unchallenging films but even this is just an uneven mess. At times, it’s nauseatingly jerky and stilted with its fast pacing but mostly it’s nauseatingly tiresome and slow as the characters advance to one station and decipher the clue like it’s some kind of Amazing Race played out in a museum or a library.

I’m not even going to complain at where the movie differs from the book. It doesn’t really matter.

The only thing worthy of anyone’s attention is incredible actor Irffan Khan who has a tragically minor role here. I would have watched him portray his mysterious and influential character for his own trilogy.

Hanks just doesn’t have the charisma to pull off this kind of treasure hunt time and time again. He’s no Harrison Ford. He should really stick to comedies with his hangdog, scrunched up face and bad hair. Sadly, there’s still one unfilmed Langdon book and another is in the works, while the author once said that he had solid ideas for 12 of them in total.

Please do another sequel to Splash instead, will ya Tommy?