“The Da Vinci Code”

Director: Ron Howard

Starring: Tom Hanks and

Audrey Tautou

Length: 148 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

RATING: 2 / 4

Christians are outraged and albinos are offended and people around the world who haven’t even seen the film are angry simply, it seems, in preparation for being angry.

But everyone can just take a deep breath and calm down. Because “The Da Vinci Code” is finally coming to theaters, and its biggest sin has nothing to do with the supposedly blasphemous nature of the source material, Dan Brown’s blockbuster page turner.

Rather, its sin is of omission. Even at two and a half hours, director Ron Howard’s adaptation feels cursory and rushed.

Then again, maybe Howard was doomed from the start. In taking an intricate book about a centuries-old religious mystery that’s sold 60 million copies, Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman with whom he spun gold with 2001’s Oscar-winning “A Beautiful Mind” inevitably had to trim something. Otherwise, they would have ended up with a miniseries.

The novel is by no means great literature, but it is enormously engrossing. Much of what sucks you in is watching Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and police cryptologist Sophie Neveu piece together clues left for them at a murder scene at the Louvre museum and at religious sites across Europe. They think things through; they draw from their experiences. They make mistakes; they finally solve one puzzle and move on to the next.

As played by longtime Howard favorite Tom Hanks and French actress Audrey Tautou, Robert and Sophie proceed from one problem to the next with such speed and ease, it’s as if they’re high-school kids on a scavenger hunt, looking for a stop sign and a No. 2 pencil.

Within seconds of finding the words “So dark the con of man,” written on a painting in invisible ink, they realize it’s an anagram for a work by Leonardo Da Vinci, which leads them to the next clue. And that mathematical sequence scrawled on the gallery floor? Of course it’s the number of a Swiss bank account containing a hugely important portion of the secret. Duh.

It would help if we cared deeply about the characters who are willing to risk their lives to uncover this vast church cover-up to find the long-hidden truth about the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.