WITH all the hype preceding it, the actual film version of The Da Vinci Code is a disappointment on a level with finding a plastic beaker of Ribena in the resting place of the Holy Grail.

Dan Brown's contentious bestseller may have had little literary merit but it was a breathless, page-turner of an adventure. Director Ron Howard's adaptation comes in at a turgid two and a half hours and his reduction of the book's frantic code-cracking to trace Christ's bloodline has all the excitement of Channel 4's Countdown Conundrum.

Brown made discourse and debate about art history and renegade Catholic cults accessible but entertaining. More baffling than any of the puzzles on show is why Howard decided to dumb things down even further.

Leads Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou play a Harvard symbologist and a French detective respectively but alternately have to play stupid so the history of female suppression through the Catholic Church can be spelt out.

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Aside from a good joke about the glass pyramid entrance to Parisian museum The Louvre, the script is very bland. Humour - when it comes - is unintentional.

The albino assassin of the religious sect Opus Dei Silas (Paul Bettany) gets his kicks whipping himself and securing a garter of spikes to his thigh.

Yet when detective Sophie Neveu (Tautou) confronts him about murdering her grandfather, she gives him a series of slaps as punishment. You can see his eyes light up.

Elsewhere, art collector Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen in a fruity but stereotypical performance) just happens to have a sildeshow presentation to hand to illustrate his theories about the hidden messages in Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Supper.

You would have thought that with the much of the book's theorising denied him, Howard would have played up the action scenes but the film has none that stand out. He fudges the showdown between Robert Langdon (Hanks) and Sir Leigh Teabing. And when there is a car chase, it's in a reversing Smart Car lasting about 10 seconds.

You keep waiting for a moment to seize you. But, if anything, the film gets sappier as it goes on. The final realisation of Neveu's destiny is mawkishly handled and events just peter out.

With television shows such as 24 showing just how nailbiting races against time can be, The Da Vinci Code is a lumbering embarrassment.

As Langdon, the thinking man's hero, Hanks is surprsingly colourless. If only as much work as went in to creating his luxuriant weave of swept-back hair was put into his character. His claustrophobic neuroses are played up to give him some depth, but throughout Langdon is a queasy, anonymous presence.

Worse is Tautou. As brilliant as she was speaking French in Amelie, her contorted English are harder to decypher than any of the codes up on screen.

A huge disappointment.