The Da Vinci Code * out of ****

In your summer stocking...a lump of coal.

It's a fish, folks. A stiff, cold one wrapped in last Sunday's ads. "The Da Vinci Code" is a buttoned-up bore, a prestige picture so prude most scenes could have staged at the community playhouse. Director Ron Howard, screenwriter Akiva Goldsman and every single actor colors completely inside the lines of Dan Brown's novel. The book works because the camera is our imagination. The movie captures little of th aura, momentum or controversy found in Brown's pages.

Challenging the divinity of Jesus Christ by claiming he married Mary Magdalene and fathered children, "The Da Vinci Code" was an effective piece of historical fantasy because it compressed its story into 24 hours, played fast with the truth (such as relying on Gospels written 200 years after the death of Jesus) used intriguing locales (The Lourve, Westminster Abbey) and dared to villanize a real Catholic organization (Opus Dei) as mastermind of a conspiracy to suppress, as several characters call it, "the sacred feminine." The secret is revealed when a hooded albino monk (Paul Bettany) shoots the curator of Louvre -who has time before dying to tip off Harvard professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and cryptologist grannddaughter Sophie(Audrey Tautou) that his murder is more meaningful than it seems. Chief inspector Bezu Fache (Jean Reno) has reason to suspect Langdon is the killer. Sophie, working off her own clues, knows better.

The movie then shifts into a lengthy scavenger hunt for, yes, The Holy Grail, protected by the Priory of Sion, a ancient religious sect that included Da Vinci and Sir Issac Newton among its members. The Grail is not a cup, but Jesus' bloodline, as Langdon and Sophie discover from British grail historian Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen). It's Teabing, hobbling about on canes in his cavernous mansion, who lays out the movie's conspiracy theories in a 20-minute lecture that includes flashbacks and microwave history. It deserves a small refutation.

To quote Hanks, the material peddled here is "hooey," but, taken sincerely, it begs a serious question - if Jesus was married, and thus not the son of God, does it matter whether he has a bloodline? Goldsman and Howard make some effort to inject a certain character with healing abilities that suggest Jesus' miraculous powers, and in fact the movie needs Jesus to be just who the four Gospels found in the Bible say he is - a prophet, a martyr, sinless. But the Jesus presented in those Gospels is not married, except to his "bride" in Revelation: The church of his believers. Though Brown's book more clearly wants readers to consider the Gnostic position (that Jesus was not, as the Gospel of John claims, the word become flesh, but the word *and* the flesh) the movie cannot argue that without taking yet another ten minutes to jabber. In other words, it's no "JFK" in presenting its alternate reality.

Which is permissable, cinematically, if "The Da Vinci Code" pulsed with hot blood. But Howard buries his actors beneath the screenplay. The ghostly, grainy flashbacks seem borrowed from the History Channel or Unsolved Mysteries. The photography, courtesy Salvatore Totino, is serviceable but phony - the shadows are manufactured, the exotic locales touristy. Again and again, Howard relies on reaction shots, needless closeups, and a domesticity born out of, yes, the nature of the screenplay, but also Howard's recent habit, since beginning work with Totino, to put scenes inside a concentrated, austere box of drama, as he intends an actor to say in every scene, "I need to believe a miracle can happen." Howard is of the right demeanor for "The Da Vinci Code" - his movies aren't exactly faint, and some of his better efforts (the first half of "Ransom," "The Missing") almost seem to slide a solemn tint on their camera lenses - so it's fair to assume he divined a path to daylight and a $500 million worldwide box office and directed the squarest picture he could imagine. Its dull polish isn't even completely tangible; it's simply immediate and pitiable.

Hanks acts he showed up and took orders as Robert Langdon. He walks, runs, squints - his lips even move. Truthfully, Hanks lacks the arrogance to invest in half-baked academic wit, and that rare talent to make the inane - "I have to get to a library, fast" - sound urgent. His co-star, Tautou, has the presence and beauty, along with the most infectious grin in movies. A shame she gets to use it only once, in the movie's only clever joke. McKellen is starting to slip into Anthony Hopkins country. And the less said about Bettany's bizarre monk - his Latin brogue and welt-ridden body - the better.