Also, perhaps, they have God on their side.

The police, both French and British, are one step behind them all of this time, but Sophie and Robert are facile, inventive and daring. Sophie warns Robert he is in danger from Fache, and they elude capture in the Louvre and set off on a quest that leads them to the vault of a private bank, to the French villa of Sir Leigh Teabing ( Ian McKellen), to the Temple Church in London, to an isolated Templar church in the British countryside, to a hidden crypt and then back to the Louvre again. Having read the novel, we know what happens then. Most people are content with a dying word or two Jacques leaves us with a film treatment. This poor man has been shot and will die late at night inside the Louvre his wounds, although mortal, fortunately leave him time enough to conceal a safe deposit key, strip himself, cover his body with symbols written in his own blood, arrange his body in a pose and within a design by Da Vinci, and write out, also in blood, an encrypted message, a scrambled numerical sequence and a footnote to Sophie Neveu ( Audrey Tautou), the pretty French policewoman whom he raised after the death of her parents. Hanks stars as Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist in Paris for a lecture when Inspector Fache ( Jean Reno) informs him of the murder of museum curator Jacques Sauniere (Jean-Pierre Marielle). Luckily, Ron Howard is a better filmmaker than Dan Brown is a novelist he follows Brown's formula (exotic location, startling revelation, desperate chase scene, repeat as needed) and elevates it into a superior entertainment, with Tom Hanks as a theo-intellectual Indiana Jones.

While the book is a potboiler written with little grace and style, it does supply an intriguing plot. And that since everyone has read the novel, I need only give away one secret - that the movie follows the book religiously. Let us begin, then, by agreeing that The Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction.

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