Lost in the jumble
‘WRONG basilica?” asks Dr. Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones) in Venice, well into the second hour of “Inferno.” “Wrong country,” replies Tom Hanks’ Robert Langdon, and you wish someone would walk up with a giant mackerel, Monty Python-style, and slap everyone in the face with it. That the movie just wasted considerable energy dashing urgently through Venice, Italy, proves the scenery is the star.
So it goes in the tangled second follow-up to “The Da Vinci Code.” If that movie found an intriguing secret history of the world hidden in plain sight, this one is more like a needlessly contrived puzzle. Really, if a villainous billionaire (Ben Foster) wanted to make sure half of humanity got killed off by a supervirus even after his own death, surely he wouldn’t leave behind a trail of clues so preposterously complicated that the chance of anyone fig- uring things out was close to nil.
Alongside a kindly doc (Jones), the Harvard symbologist Langdon wakes up in Florence, Italy, with a bump on his head and selective amnesia. Note that the film takes its title from a poem written by Dante 700 years ago, which coincidentally was the last time it wasn’t trite to tell a story about a guy who wakes up with a bump on his head and amnesia.
The film is never gripping, but at least it moves. Director Ron Howard does his best to spark excitement, and there are a couple of twists to keep things lively. Nothing is what it seems — unless it seems ridiculous.
What we’ve got here is basically a James Bond movie minus most of the fun stuff. Instead we get lots of footage of Langdon puzzling over acrostics and doing some creaky middle-aged hustling. Run, Forrest, run! Then take your Lipitor.