God and mystery: The three movies Tom Hanks called “hooey”
Controversy isn’t a word often associated with the enduring beacon of wholesomeness Tom Hanks exudes, but he found himself knee-deep in it anyway by signing on to headline an adaptation that ruffled feathers all across the world.
After becoming a bestselling literary sensation, it was only a matter of time before Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was adapted for the big screen, with the rights being snapped up by Sony for the princely sum of $6million. Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard was drafted in, and after Bill Paxton turned down the role of Robert Langdon due to his commitments to the TV series Big Love, Hanks was recruited.
It isn’t a regular thing for Hanks to sign on the dotted line to lead a major blockbuster, which by extension made The Da Vinci Code a pretty big deal, especially when the source material had sold upwards of 80 million copies. There was no way the movie was going to be anything other than a massive hit, despite the best efforts of various religious groups to try and thwart it at every turn.
It was banned in Syria, Belarus, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iran, while the mystery thriller was pulled from Chinese cinemas following protests, it was boycotted by the largest cinema chain in the Faroe Islands, both the book and the film were outlawed in Egypt, Pakistan denied it a release following accusations of blasphemy, and a presidential order was issued in Sri Lanka declaring it wouldn’t be screened.
Even after incurring the wrath of so many organisations, politicians, and nations – which extended through to protestations from the Vatican City and outcries from assorted high-profile Catholic figures – The Da Vinci Code soared to $760m at the global box office and still reigns supreme as the highest-grossing live-action movie of Hanks’ entire career.
The outcry was rendered somewhat bizarre by virtue of the fact the entire narrative was nonsensical and hardly grounded in reality, with the leading man and his floppy mullet-like hair travelling from place to place to unravel a wide-ranging conspiracy that threatened to shake the foundations of Christianity to its very core. That didn’t stop it from inciting fury worldwide, though, made even stranger considering The Da Vinci Code was 149 minutes of big-budget tedium that wasted a stacked cast and an intriguing premise on a workmanlike, unexciting, and altogether unremarkable adventure.
The apathetic reception clearly had a huge impact on the ticket-buying public, seeing as sequels Angels & Demons and Inferno earned less money combined than the first instalment had on its lonesome, conspiring to create a genuine blockbuster anomaly. All told, the trilogy roped in over $1.4 billion at the box office so it was clearly a hugely successful enterprise, but trying to find anybody willing to defend any of the three chapters as being inarguably good movies is a nigh-on impossible task.
Still, Hanks knew exactly what he was getting himself into, conceding that one of the major driving forces behind his decision to board The Da Vinci Code was the promise of a boost in his bank balance. “God, that was a commercial enterprise,” he admitted to the New York Times. “Yeah, those Robert Langdon sequels are hooey. The Da Vinci Code was hooey.”
Describing the trio as “delightful scavenger hunts that are about as accurate to history as the James Bond movies are to espionage,” Hanks would subsequently trash the entire franchise. Sharing his belief that “there’s nothing wrong with good commerce, provided it is good commerce,” the two-time Oscar winner held his hands up and said, “We proved it wasn’t such good commerce.”
The bean counters at Sony would disagree after the studio ended up turning a massive profit on the trio, but for all the wrath of assorted religious folks, The Da Vinci Code and its sequels incited, the end result was more banal than blasphemous, with apathy comfortably trumping outrage. On the plus side, Hanks made some serious bank on his end, so the “hooey” was at least worth it from a financial point of view.
