`DaVinci' Casting Was Clue ToEnnui

By now everyone knows that the film adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling page-turner "The Da Vinci Code" has failed to generate much in the way of rapture. Even if it is making enough money to justify talk of sequels, critics have pointed to problems with the script, the pace of Ron Howard's direction and the cumbersome conveyance of radical religious ideas at the heart of the story. But one problem that has been overlooked is the casting. Tom Hanks, modern cinema's protean, endlessly appealing Everyman, is no Robert Langdon, the book's Harvard symbology professor-turned-man-on-the-run. Even with the goofy long hair, which seems designed to give him the abstract air of a scholarly sort, Hanks is too soft around the edges, too genial, too sexless. [More]