Hated It!

Bill Donohue, America's cattiest film critic, giggles like a schoolgirl as critics pan The Da Vinci Code movie:

Here's a sample of what critics who previewed "The Da Vinci Code" yesterday had to say about the movie:

• "Dud"; Unwieldy"; "Plodding." (Reuters)

• "A Bloated Puzzle"; "The movie is so drenched in dialogue musing over arcane mythological and historical lore and scenes grow so static that even camera movement can't disguise the dramatic inertia"; "No chemistry exists between the hero and the heroine." (Hollywood Reporter)

• "Almost as bad as the book." (Boston Globe)

• "High-minded lurid material sucked dry by a desperately solemn approach"; They've "drained all the fun out of the melodrama." (Variety)

• When the movie "takes a brief wrong turn, and Howard momentarily loses control of his huge, streamlined vehicle, it's hard to say where to put the blame." (FoxNews.com)

• "Critics Crucify 'Da Vinci Code.'" (Australian Associated Press)

• "Critics largely panned the cinematic version"; "The movie did receive some lukewarm praise, but the majority of the response was highly critical"; "One scene during the film, meant to be serious, elicited prolonged laughter from the audience. There was no applause when the credits rolled; instead, a few catcalls and hisses broke the silence." (CNN)

• "At one point, some of them responded in the auditorium with laughter to one of the developments in the plot—something director Ron Howard would not have anticipated." (Press Association Newsfile)

• "Shrugs of indifference, some jeering laughter and a few derisive jabs"; "The Cannes audience clearly grew restless as the movie dragged on to two and a half hours and spun a long sequence of anticlimactic revelations"; "Some people walked out during the movie's closing minutes…and there was none of the scattered applause even bad movies sometimes receive at Cannes." (AP)

Bill Donohue said, "If Ron Howard is being laughed at by those predisposed to believe the worst about Catholicism, he's an utter failure."

That's hard cheese, because I was thinking of using the movie to break my Da Vinci Code vow of poverty. (Tom Hanks with cool hair, Audrey Tatou with that certain I-don't-know-what… How could they have mucked this up?)

Elsewhere, Donohue puts out some interesting comparative stats about who's reading the book and who's actually believing it.