An ungainly fusion of National Treasure and The Passion of the Christ, Ron Howard's shapeless, meandering transliteration of Dan Brown's pseudoreligious thriller posits an age-old war between secret societies: the shadowy (but real) Opus Dei and the even shadowier Priory of Sion. But the movie's more pertinent struggle is the one between the story's superficial Christian inquiry and the much more pressing demands of the big-budget thriller. Next to the matter of whether or not it's possible to make a blockbuster that substantially addresses spiritual themes, the question of Christ's divinity seems like an open-and-shut case.

Drawn into the ancient conflict, Tom Hanks' "professor of religious symbology" (the world's only, apparently) and Parisian crypto-cop Audrey Tatou are faced with a series of puzzles, not the least of which is why Tatou's murdered grandfather, leaving behind clues for his French-speaking offspring, would craft each and every one of his word-games in English. But logic won't help you solve The Da Vinci Code's mysteries, which tend toward the ineffable. The movie's technique, apparently drawn from the book, is to hold out the promise of concrete, decipherable answers to the mysteries of faith that have perplexed and baffled scholars for millennia, and then fumble the ball at the goal line, making a few half-hearted gestures in the direction of the unknowable and closing with an act of unsupported belief that can only be construed as a cynical sop to the religious right.

Brown's story (and here be spoilers for those who have thus far escaped the details of Brown's yarn) centers around the notion that Jesus was a man, not divine, and that Mary Magdalene was his wife, one whose presence has been successfully erased from the history books by Opus Dei's machinations—carried out in the present day by Paul Bettany's albino flagellant. The vague reference to centuries of Catholic anti-feminism has been enough to earn the book the specter of "significance," but, at least in movie form, the working-out of ideas is so vague and incoherent that it's impossible to come away with more than the scarcest hint of what it's "about." It doesn't help that The Da Vinci Code has more endings than any movie since The Return of the King, each of which seems to point the viewer in a different direction. Pin the tail on the savior.

The Da Vinci Code might acquire some weight if Brown (or screenwriter Akiva Goldsman) had bothered to stock his pond with genuine characters, but Hanks and Tatou are given nothing to do but run from place to place and occasionally squeeze off a few lines. (Tatou's nadir comes early on, when she breathlessly intones, "An anagram!") First-year screenwriting students would be laughed out of class for concocting Hanks' backstory, which involves a childhood crisis of faith precipitated by a fall down a well. Yes, really. Ian McKellen gives the movie's only performance as a crippled Grail scholar, and when he's finally driven off raving in the backseat of a car, I found myself wishing I could go with him.

Directed by Ron Howard

Now playing at area theaters