If you have not read the book, I highly recommend going to ...

... see the The Da Vinci Code movie. It will only cost you about 2h 29m run time and may save you the colossal misfortune of reading the book. I haven't read it, but if the online reviews can be believed, then the movie runs pretty slapdash close to the novel and so I am happy to get out as scot-free as I did.

It is interminably long and incredibley silly. Whole scenes are devoted to long expositions from the main characters explaining minor point of Gnostic doctrine. Nobody outside of Shakespearen monologues talks like this and at least there the words drip like jewels.

The Tom Hanks protagonist performs quicking thinking riddle solving and solves complex mathematical codes at every turn with never even a hint of hesitation or mistep ... and ....AND while under the threat of chase and possible death. The acting is uneven and the director must have been asleep to allow the actors's affect to run from the bemused to the contemptuously arrogant all during the telling a 2 min. faux historical tale. Watch their faces as the old koot historian prattles on. And then the plot is just dumb. And long. And boring. Did I mention it was long?

As a BBC reviewer complained incredulously, "THE WHOLE THING GOES ON FOR HOURS AND HOURS. The plotting, which seemed endearingly silly on the page, is snortingly preposterous on screen: our heroes tumble po-faced from peril to peril with insane regularity. At one point, they get saved by a pigeon."

That bares repeating.....

They get saved by a pigeon.

Do yourself a favor. Go see it in the theatres so noone will trick you into reading the book. You won't regret it.