The film-going world is divided into two halves and The Da Vinci Code should terrify them both. For those who have read Dan Brown’s book, this white-knuckle ride through the story’s essentials leaves out (I would guess) absolutely everything that smacks of a pause, a reflection, a tea break or a theological musing. For those like me determined to go to heaven by not reading it – at great cost to our cocktail party lives – Ron Howard’s big-screen patience-buster is like being pinned against a wall by someone wanting to tell you the plot, the whole plot and nothing but the plot.

The book cannot be as cuckoo as this cheerfully appalling film, I kept thinking. (Send contradictions to my email address.) Tom Hanks dashes around France and London as a religious symbology expert helping the French police discover who killed a Louvre Museum curator one dark night in the Mona Lisa room. We know who it was from scene one. It was albino monk Paul Bettany, a Catholic hitperson and career sociopath who regroups between murders by tearing off his clothes and flagellating himself.

His paymasters appear to be the Vatican or Opus Dei or a tandem of both. But Professor Hanks, aided by the curator’s supposed granddaughter Audrey (Amélie) Tautou, a police cryptologist, will surely expose the crime’s true core once he enlists the help of Sir Leigh Teabing (Sir Ian McKellen), a château-dwelling millionaire palaeo-ecclesiastical antiquarian. (Whatever do these people put on their passports?)

The film goes on like this for 150 minutes, or for ever, whichever seems more bearable to contemplate. The whole world knows by now what the story involves: a smear on traditional Christianity to the effect that Jesus Christ married and sired a bloodline. Outraged believers have been sending up white smoke from their brains since Brown’s book was published. They have had to unpack all the indignation last stored away after The Last Temptation of Christ, novel and film, which also suggested Our Lord might have had a sex life.

Christly celibacy is a notion so important to everyone that Dan Brown must have known that the Son of God is second only to Hitler (who bats for the other side) as a gift to bestsellerdom. So the novelist and former pop song writer designed a maze of riddles to prove that most frightening truth of all: that people with nothing better to do will knock themselves out searching for a reason to be apoplectic about something.

To give it to you simply – look away now if you want – the book’s gist is that “Holy Grail” equals “Sangraal” equals “Royal Blood”: ergo, bloodline. And the girlish disciple to Christ’s right in Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” is Mary Magdalene, although a million experts have yelped to the author that he/she is not and they can prove it.

None of us watching the film can yelp. Our responses are paralysed by perpetual motion. We clatter between churches and cathedrals, art galleries and gothic graveyards, like a group of tourists told their boat is leaving at sunset. There are incessant chases by car or foot, most of which confirm that 10,000 years of thought and history weigh nothing next to the truism that villains never catch up with heroes when it comes to the crunch. 

When in doubt characters draw guns (including the albino monk). No one, however empurpled, is above punching an opponent in the mouth. And what I assume was leisurely exposition in the novel – the main characters’ back stories, the history of Christianity, the rise and fall of the Knights Templar – turns into eyeblink flashbacks filmed in the fizzing style of the body-entry pathology bits in TV’s CSI. Instead of “look, it’s a bullet-riddled liver”, we get “look, it’s 100 years of papal- Rosicrucian face-off”.

Most performers become cinematic roadkill, not least poor Mlle Tautou, French-accenting such lines as “I’ve nevairr seen much good from looking into the past.” (Now she tells us.) Tom Hanks is the best that Hollywood can field as the thinking symbologist’s Indiana Jones. But no sooner are we used to him acting Tautou off the screen than Sir Ian enters to act him off the screen. The Da Vinci Code is a McKellen film as surely as David Copperfield is a Micawber novel. Nothing else matters when he is around. His contribution is so witty and inventive – twirling lines like pipe-cleaner animals, surfing octaves, turning banalities into bons mots – that the former stage thespian must be recaptured for Shakespeare and the live theatre as fast as possible, if necessary by violence and abduction. I shall be auditioning albino monks for this task, starting from Friday.

Own goals

Texas is a country and a culture all its own. It is as big as Britain. It has spawned US presidents and TV’s Dallas. So anything goes there, including mad tales of ex-naval youngsters (Gael García Bernal) who commit incest and murder while searching for estranged small-town pastor fathers (William Hurt) who are trying to live down a bygone peccadillo.

The British ex-documentarist James Marsh’s first feature, The King, should be filed with Terence Davies’s The Neon Bible and Philip Ridley’s The Passion of Darkly Noon as bad-idea Brit-trips into the American south. The tone is somewhere between barmy and gnomic. The acting is frozen at the point of delivery, as if the players dare not quite indicate that they believe in this drama, though the charm of the daffy – hard to quantify – is occasionally present.

In Once in a Lifetime, a documentary about the Stateside rise and fall of soccer, someone says that America has too short an attention span for the game. The nation whose patience with an own-goal-scoring president is apparently infinite glazes over at the sight of 22 men doing something beautiful, purposeful and exciting.

The brief reign of the New York Cosmos – this film’s heroes – was an exception. A team put together from tyros and Titans (Pele, Carlos Alberto, Beckenbauer) drew stadium-filling crowds for a few years. But it failed to conquer TV, so that was the end. The bleak and curious story is delivered in a bleak and rather incurious film that could have asked more interesting questions about life, sport and the media.

Waiting . . .  is obscene enough to be funny, but not funny enough to be funny. The main mini-plot, a genitals-flashing game among the waiters of a low-end Irish-American bar-cum-diner (think Cheers and subtract the class), has us cooing at the writer-director Rob McKittrick’s comic daring. But real wit is hard to find, although Ryan Reynolds, the dernier cri among new Hollywood hunks, has better comic timing than we thought.