Leonardo da Vinci movie scrapes bottom of ideas barrel

The worst movie pitch is one that fills its listeners with a sense of familiarity and dread. Merely hearing a title or a logline crowds your head with scenes of tiresome inevitability. Perhaps we are old. Perhaps we are cynical. Perhaps we have seen Too Many Movies. But the proposed Leonardo da Vinci flick makes us want to emigrate from this planet.

According to The Hollywood Reporter’s Heatvision blog, da Vinci is to be the subject of a new action flick, which combines the pseudo-intellectual idiocy of The Da Vinci Code with the generalised idiocy of National Treasure. Warner Bros has apparently picked up a treatment entitled Leonardo da Vinci and the Soldiers of Forever. The naming of this is, we guess, supposed to remind us of the family fun offered by Mr I Jones and Co but instead brings to mind the £1.99 films you can buy at the Post Office with a rip-off cover and a title like: Mr Bullwhip and the Terracotta Army of Doom.

We’ll quote the plot outline straight from THR, lest you think we are willfully inventing this stuff to torment you.

“The project re-imagines Da Vinci as a member of a secret society who falls headlong into a supernatural adventure that pits the man against Biblical demons in a story involving secret codes, lost civilizations, hidden fortresses and fallen angels.”

Read that again and really feel each individual brain cell dying. What really breaks our collective biscuit about this project is that da Vinci was a polymath and man of science. And here we have him battling demons.

The people behind this project are producers Adrian Askarieh (Hitman, Kane & Lynch), Roy Lee and Doug Davison (lots of J-Horror remakes: The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water).

But these are not the real culprits. And at a time when Abraham Lincoln and Marco Polo are getting fantasy/action/adventure movie makeovers, the culprits really need IDing. Nor can we actually blame Dan Brown for the sexing up of historical scholarship to provide a fantasy backdrop for act/ad movies, though he was its first beneficiary. In fact, the story begins with a work of what we might loosely call popular scholarship, called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Published in 1982 by Jonathan Cape in London, it was an unofficial follow-up to some BBC documentaries that splashed around in the shallow end of (Biblical) hermeneutics. The book’s central thesis was that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalen, who was his favourite disciple. When he was arrested, a heavily pregnant Mary was spirited over to Europe by none other than Joseph of Arimathea. He took her to the South of France where the Knights Templar swore to protect Christ’s wife and child. The evidence for this was found in what the book’s authors (Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln) perceived to be mistranslations and misinterpretations of Biblical words and phrases, as well as evidence in the form of paperwork which apparently showed Christ’s bloodline descending through the ages in the form of the Merovingian dynasty.

As it turned out, Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln were the victims of a hoax perpetrated by a man called Pierre Plantard who stashed some apocryphal papers in a library and gave the authors a tip-off. The paperwork included lists of members of the Knights Templar through the ages who had known the secret of Christ’s bloodline – the list of names included da Vinci, Victor Hugo and other luminaries of the arts and sciences. The paperwork also named one Pierre Plantard as Christ’s living descendant and heir to the Merovingian dynasty. Handy!

The hoax was uncovered after a few years but was apparently missed by Mrs Dan Brown, researcher for her novelist husband. She discovered The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, highlighted the salient parts and gave it to Dan, who regurgitated the information wholesale in his novel The Da Vinci Code.

Obviously, no one comes out of this story looking good (and Dan Brown worse than most, now that you know his sole invention was cardboard character Robert Langdon – the renowned symbologist who can‘t read Latin) but it seems unfair to drag da Vinci’s name through the mud. On the other hand, why not drag more names through the mud in the service of the big green buck$$$$. So, to that end, here are some more terrible pitches you can have for free:

Marie Curie and the Ghosts of Radiation: When Marie Curie’s discovers radium, a terrible lab accident sees her exposed to high levels of radioactivity. Far from killing her slowly, the toxic dose gives Curie atomic powers, including the ability to communicate with the dead and phase through solid objects – all of which come in handy when she has to destroy a high-level conspiracy to replace Queen Victoria on the throne of England with a steampunk doppelganger.

Mahatma Gandhi and the Ruby of the Templars: A (sexy!) time-traveller from a distant future must enlist the help of Gandhi to help uncover the location of a precious stone that unlocks a secret door behind which is the clue to deciphering the hidden meaning in a painting which will lead them to the key for the puzzle which decodes the shocking Biblical secrets contained in an ancient scroll. Along the way, Gandhi learns to love the power and performance of an AK -47.

Tony Blair and the Re-writing of History: A maverick prime minister discovers that the key to keeping his American counterpart happy is hidden in an ancient city in the Middle East. Deception and huge explosions ensue.