The latest Dan Brown adventure on film took everyone to the outskirts of Rome through a series of mind-boggling mysteries and cold-blooded murders. The Pope was dead and the Conclave of the College of Cardinals was about to select the successor.

However, the Illuminatti, a 400-year-old underground movement, kidnapped four cardinals and started killing them one after the other, and threatened to blow up Rome with Anti-Matter in a jar that came into their possession. I thought peanut butter with salmonela can do the job well. Ho-hum.

That was how Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), a Harvard religious expert, came into the scene and started the film’s version of Amazing Race. The clues, provided by Galileo’s old writing, were hidden under 4 elemental symbols – Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Dead bodies bore the Illuminati emblem on their chests providing Langdon and his team clues to the next murder. From a thousand icons that decorated Rome, only a handful of them pointed to the next crime scene. If you’re the participant in this chase, you’d certainly hit your ideal weight without weight loss pills. You would also need Prof. Xavier’s mutant power aside from the ability to read maps and an Italian-English dictionary. And by this time, after watching too many movies, you should know who’s Italian and who’s not. Ewan McGregor was a Vatican priest but still did sound Scottish.

The movie allowed viewers (especially non-Brown readers) to exercise their mental faculties and entertained the most bored among us — with clues and a trip to one of the oldest cities in the world for less than P200. I haven’t been to Rome but watching the film was like a tour in itself. The last time I was there was during Mission Impossible 3.