‘The Da Vinci Code” has now entered movie theaters the way a large wet black Labrador dumbly but amiably invades a living room and seeks approval by shaking himself dry midst the retreating guests.

In short, this movie, condemned as rabid by certain Vatican officials and fundamentalist preachers, is a large but harmless dog that needs to be petted rather than put down.

This film is such a dog that it should not be rated by the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America, but the ASPCA, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

After months of warnings by frightened religious leaders that the movie was the beast from the Apocalypse that would leap through the bronze doors of St. Peter’s Basilica and devour the faithful, it is just a trembling animal scratching to be admitted to sanctuary from the critics out to devour it.

The best antidote is the one prescribed in 1973 when church leaders thought that “The Exorcist,” a tale of demonic possession, was a threat to the Christian faith. See the movie, people were urged, and see your own way through such inanities as its depiction of Satan as a pubescent girl.

Instead of warning people to boycott “The Da Vinci Code,” religious leaders should be buying out the local multiplexes so as many believers as possible can see this film. It threatens neither religion generally nor the Catholic Church in particular.

The movie is, however, a threat to Sony Pictures, which invested untold millions in producing and distributing it. Seeing it not only frees believers from unnecessary anxiety but helps the shareholders of a corporation that made no small mistake in trying to translate a smash novel into a smash movie.

This novel – indeed, all novels, according to the late novelist/ screenwriter John Gregory Dunne – loses what makes it readable when people try to transform it into something watchable. A screenplay, he writes, is “skeletal … fragmented, a form in which words are secondary to potential images.”

Images trump words, ideas and any real understanding of the meaning of symbols allegedly at the heart of the story. Symbols are intrinsic to genuine religious faith, but their meaning is always spiritual rather than literal. They are not, as they are made to seem in this film, crossword puzzle-like keys to a 2,000-year cover-up of marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

Such sensibility in a novel is overwhelmed by sensation on film. It follows the late great actor John Barrymore’s prescription for what to do when things get dull in a movie: “Give them a little more torture.”

In “Da Vinci,” most of that torture comes from at the hands of an albino monk who lacerates his flesh to purify himself before he murders people. That he is a member of Opus Dei is an affront to an organization that, however secret, preaches and lives by high ideals.

A viewer is not surprised that in every scene the distinguished actor Tom Hanks seems to be looking for a window or a door, as if trying to find his way out of a character so shallowly drawn that he could find no way into it.

All believers should attend if only for one scene – when Audrey Tautou, playing the supposed last descendant of Jesus, flees police while driving a car in reverse at high speed through the streets of Paris, sideswiping autos and smashing fixtures.

This backward car chase is the only real symbol in reels of film crammed with phony ones. Those who coaxed this dog onto the screen got everything backwards at high speed.

The familiar warning from automobile ads should be included as a subscript on every frame of the film: DO NOT ATTEMPT THESE MANEUVERS.