Descent into ‘Inferno’
Hanks’ latest Robert Langdon thriller never catches fire
The third and weakest of the Professor Robert Langdon-based film adaptations, “Inferno,” director Ron Howard's third entry, uses Dante Alighieri and his birthplace of Florence, Italy, the way “Angels & Demons” used the Vatican.
In opening scenes featuring hellish — for at least two reasons — shaky-cam visions of people in great torment, blood, fire and a mysterious masked woman, we meet again “The Da Vinci Code's” Professor Langdon (Tom Hanks). He has a terrible-looking head wound and amnesia, and lies in a hospital bed in what he discovers is Florence. Why he does not ask the very British and very resourceful Dr. Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones) how she ended up working in the emergency room in a Florence hospital is beyond me.
Maybe it's that head wound. Anyway, in other opening scenes we also meet the surprisingly uninteresting Bertrand Zobrist (a miscast Ben Foster), a billionaire American scientist and what I would call an unmotivational speaker, preaching the gospel of mass murder as the only means to save planet Earth. Also in this film's unlikely mix are Elizabeth Sinskey (Dane Sidse Babett Knudsen), the head of the World Health Organization, Christoph Bouchard (Frenchman Omar Sy), commander of a group of armed WHO enforcers, private security mastermind Harry “The Provost” Sims (Irrfan Khan, “The Lunchbox”), a Botticelli-painted map of hell based on Dante's “Inferno,” a nasty-looking rash and a Terminator-like assassin-for-hire on a Moto Guzzi named Vayentha (Ana Ularu) on Langdon's trail.
The film, which reaches its climax in Istanbul (author Dan Brown really likes James Bond locations), tells the not very compelling or plausible tale of Zobrist's plans to kill 95 percent of the world's population by unleashing a global pathogen. Yes, that again. Can Langdon thwart the deaths of 7 billion people?
We also get Brown's signature trail-of-breadcrumbs plotting, although at times I felt like I was watching one long chase scene. The film is hackwork by almost everyone involved, including Brown, shamelessly recycling, and if you think shaky-cam styling in expensive films is an insult to the audience, I am with you. The 10th time we see flashbacks to Langdon's visions of what is supposed to be a Dante-esque hell, I was ready to bolt. The entire enterprise is not helped by the alternately dull and ludicrous dialogue of screenwriter David Koepp, adapting Brown's novel.
As Professor Langdon and Dr. Brooks, whose hair is always perfectly coiffed, flee for the 10th time from someone hot on their heels or take a side trip to Venice, I found myself admiring the scenery. On this third outing for our absent-minded professor, the hooey, if not flubber factor, just goes right through the roof.
(“Inferno” contains violence, gruesome images and a sexually suggestive scene.)