The religious sect that recently advised parishioners to "fast unto death" to protest "The Da Vinci Code" can start eating again. This "Code" isn't all it's cracked up to be.

That won't stop the stampede to the box office. It's the must-see movie of the summer, if only because of the religious protests akin to the uproar over the Danish political cartoons. We're living in dangerous times when a merely okay summer movie can make everyone forget the golden rule: It's only a movie, folks.

Director Ron Howard's adequate adaptation of the book everyone's talking about isn't nearly as thrilling as Dan Brown's best seller about murder and revisionist Christianity. Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou give cautious, uninspired performances as puzzle solvers and Holy Grail seekers on the run from an albino killer monk and what's billed as the biggest coverup in history.

It opens on a spectacularly creepy note. A curator at the Louvre uses his dying moments to leave elaborate clues scrawled in his own blood. It's up to Robert Langdon (Hanks), a Harvard symbologist, and French police cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Tautou) to crack the code.

Then there are more codes. There are so many, in fact, it's like that "I Love Lucy" episode in which the chocolates rumbled down the conveyor belt too fast to box them all.

This is more of a mental thriller than an action movie. That worked in the book's favor, but film is a visual medium. Floating-anagram techniques borrowed from the spelling-bee documentary "Spellbound" aren't heart-pumping enough in a movie where characters furrow their brows or launch into mind-numbing flights of exposition.

The movie is so nervous about offending anyone that it's hardly any fun. Hanks delivers a few solemn speeches meant to deflect criticism. Meanwhile, he and Tautou barely hit it off. At least Mr. and Mrs. Smith got hot while doing their jobs.

Ian McKellen as a Holy Grail enthusiast lights up the screen, but departs too early. Paul Bettany as an albino monk is sufficiently weird amid the solemnity.

Thrillers, sci-fi and most works of fiction do best when they're founded on the plausible. The idea behind "The Da Vinci Code" - that Jesus, like any nice Jewish boy of his day, married and procreated - is enough to hang a thriller on, but hardly worth all the alarms clanging now in the Zeitgeist.