It’s official. A direct descendant of Jesus Christ is alive and well and living in Beverly Hills. I suspect she gets her sultry looks from Mary Magdalene’s side of the family. She doesn’t sport a beard and has never knowingly walked on water. But in The Da Vinci Code, Ron Howard’s rip-roaring film, which opened the Cannes festival last night, she is a top-notch cryptologist with sex appeal. Good genes will out, obviously.

The thrill is that no one has the faintest inkling what is going on when the glamorous cop, Audrey Tautou, and a handsomely paid symbologist, Professor Tom Hanks, are dragged to the Louvre at midnight to investigate a gruesome ritualistic murder.

The gallery is one of many terrific locations. Gloomy oil paintings glare down from the walls at the spread-eagled body of a naked elderly man who is surrounded by blood and symbols. The dread is cleverly compounded by the fact that the mystery is elaborately hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci. Tautou is a dab hand at cracking arcane codes, but Hanks’s laid-back professor has the thankless task of explaining it all.

The bewildering clues trigger a frantic dash to expose the greatest cover-up of all time before it is buried for ever by crazed monks from the sinister Roman Catholic order of Opus Dei.

The investigators of the murder become prime suspects and flee for their lives. Enemies — mostly Catholics — lurk around every corner. Alfred Molina is a plump and poisonous bishop who pulls strings from Rome. Jean Reno’s evangelical FBI agent puts the fear of God into everyone he meets. But Paul Bettany’s albino monk, Silas, is an absolute peach. He chases Hanks and Tautou across Europe with a gun in one hand and a whip to flagellate himself with in the other. I’ve rarely seen an actor have more fun.

Thankfully, Tautou has the driving skills of Michael Schumacher. When he’s not giving birth to ingenious thoughts, Hanks spends most of the film looking travel sick. There is little time for idle chat or romantic twinkles before the next Vaticansponsored bullet.

According to Dan Brown, the author of the book of the film, the Church has been pulling our leg for the best part of 2,000 years. His fiction rests on the “novel” idea that the Church has conspired to crush evidence of the Holy Grail, along with the guardians of the secret. Unfortunately, no one could mistake Brown for a serious theologian in the same way that no one could mistake Ron Howard for Fellini. The story is so far-fetched that it brings tears of pure joy.

There are red herrings galore. A multimillion-pound blockbuster that starts in Paris and ends up in a hamlet in Scotland has clearly got a lot of explaining to do.

The wealth of exposition about the Priory of Sion, the Merovingian kings of France, and the Knights Templar is stifling. Any thriller that can throw up the line “I have to get to a library fast” is in dire need of medical attention.

To his eternal credit, Howard illuminates entire chapters by making them look like suppertime at Hogwarts. The actors stroll through chunks of history and armies of crusader ghosts like panic-stricken students on an endless tour of Gothic churches.

Ian McKellen provides the most magnetic character. He is fabulously arch as the rich eccentric who harbours the refugees and the even greater desire to explode the greatest myth yet invented. “He who controls the keys to Heaven rules the world,” he cackles.

The good news is that if a direct bloodline to Mr and Mrs Christ were found, we could scrap Sundays and presumably lay our earthly grievances elsewhere. Yes, the film is a cat’s cradle of lunatic ideas with lashings of religious psychobabble, but it’s infinitely easier to forgive than the book that begat it, if only because Howard is a consummate director of old-fashioned entertainment, while Brown is a clever and mighty lucky hack.

This review appeared in late editions of The Times yesterday

JAMES CHRISTOPHER

What the (other) papers said . . .

New York Post
Ron Howard’s The Da Vinci Code is . . . a crackling, fast-moving thriller that’s every bit as brainy and irresistible as Dan Brown’s . . . bestseller.
Lou Lumenick

Variety
A pulpy page- turner . . . has become a stodgy, grim thing in the exceedingly literal-minded film version.
Todd McCarthy

Daily Mail
If anything, it’s spiritual tripe. But it’s tripe of the highest possible order. It’s well made and there are scenes of pure magic whenever Sir Ian McKellen . . . has screen time.
Baz Bamigboye

The Hollywood Reporter
Da Vinci never rises to the level of guilty pleasure. Too much guilt, not enough pleasure.
Kirk Honeycutt

The Daily Telegraph
It is clear from the opening scenes . . . that this is a film that will race along at a breakneck pace.
John Hiscock

Time Out
Brown’s clunky, awkward prose is well matched to Howard's frighteningly earnest, spoon-feeding approach to cinema.
Dave Calhoun

Evening Standard
Almost every word is delivered with ludicrous urgency and attended to with comical concentration.
David Sexton

Explore Film

• DVD

• Film Reviews

• Bollywood

• Oscars

Editor's choice

• Burning Bush with W
• Greatest movie partnerships
• Nicole Kidman returns to Australia