Ron Howard’s good with actors. That’s obvious both from the quality of the actors who have appeared in the movies he’s directed and the quality of the performances he gets out of them. The thing is, though, The DaVinci Code really shouldn’t have been a movie about the actors or the characters — it’s a story of ideas and of action, and that means Howard just wasn’t the right choice to direct it.

The entire point of the book The DaVinci Code was to give the reader a fun, lightweight, entertaining read, to keep them turning page after page. It’s a pot-boiler, a popcorn book, and for what it was, it was a pretty good one. As implausible as so much of the plot was, the book consistently made me want to keep reading. And the movie version captured almost none of the book’s excitement, that sense of being propelled along by the mysteries and the intricate puzzles that made it so intriguing. Howard hit most of the same notes as Dan Brown’s blockbuster but couldn’t put them together into a melody anywhere near as pleasing.

It’s not that the movie was bad, mind you; The DaVinci Code certainly was made capably enough. Given the assemblage of veteran talent involved, I would have expected no less. Of course, given the veteran talent, I expected more. The actors were all, at minimum, fine. The movie picked up a bit once Sir Ian McKellen joined the action (my favorite scene in the movie was also my favorite scene from the book: the explication of the Mary Magdalene-as-Christ’s-wife theory by McKellen’s Leigh Teabing), and Paul Bettany gave a strong, creepy performance as the murderous albino Silas in what certainly was not a glamour part for him. Audrey Tautou did a perfectly OK job of looking pretty and being French, and Tom Hanks was Tom Hanks.

But if words like “fine,” “OK” and “eh” are the best I can come up with to describe most of the movie, that means something’s missing. The DaVinci Code is a thrillers with no thrills, a mystery to which everyone already knows the answer.