Tom Hanks risks damaging his good standing among
moviegoers everywhere by wearing wavy hair extensions
and playing a character whom millions of Christians
would love to hate. Tom plays a gifted symbologist
(don't ask) who is drawn into a murder mystery after
a curator is found dead, naked and spread-eagle in the
Louvre Museum. (A rather interesting way to die, if
you ask us.)

Tom subsequently hooks up with the curator's
granddaughter Audrey Tatou who is a gifted crytologist
(again, don't ask) and together, they stumble upon
what one character calls 'the greatest cover-up in
human history'. According to the (dubious) evidence
they uncover, Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and
fathered a daughter, whose bloodline survived to this
day. Not only that, Jesus was apparently no son of
God but a mere man who was elevated to his divine
position as a result of a vote held at a bishops'
convention.

Now you know why billions of Christians are riled by
The Da Vinci Code — the nerve of those people playing
fast and loose with biblical truths.

After all, The Da Vinci Code may be the bestselling
book in 2003—2005, with 36 million copies sold. But
the Bible is the bestselling book of all time, with
2.5 billion copies sold. The Bible purports to tell
the whole truth of mankind, while The Da Vinci
Code's author Dan Brown claims that his book is
based on fact and research.

But competing claims aside, The Da Vinci Code movie is
a suspenseful and briskly-paced religious thriller
that should keep you intrigued through most of its
gnarly twists and turns. It's so Hollywood-ish in so
many respects that you can't help thinking of it as
a piece of fiction not to be taken seriously. Tom
Hanks and Audrey Tatou are reliably good, though Paul
Bettany (Wimbledon, Dogville) might have hammed it up
too much as the murderous albino monk Silas.