The flicks
Tom Hanks’ new outing INFERNO leaves a burning sensation in all the wrong places, while in Oliver Stone’s SNOWDEN he couldn’t keep a secret. But could he make a difference?
INFERNO (M)
Director: Ron Howard (Rush) Starring: Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Irrfan Khan, Omar Sy, Ben Foster. Rating : *
Just over a month ago, Tom Hanks was Sully. Now he’s just silly.
But that has been par for the course ever since Hanks first stepped into the role of chipper cryptologist Robert Langdon a decade ago. In previous screen adventures absentmindedly ripped from the pages of books by author Dan Brown, Mr Langdon has nobly identified patterns, completed puzzles and joined many dastardly dots to save Christianity from going up in flames ( The Da Vinci Code), and the Vatican from going down the gurgler ( Angels and Demons).
If he can successfully complete his latest assignment, Robert Langdon is going to save the world. However, this time around, Bob has been stripped of his legendary weapons of mass deduction. As Inferno begins, he’s copped a nuclear knock to the noggin that has left him with the same case of amnesia that Jason Bourne was recently cured of.
So once Langdon is back on his feet and running for his life all over Italy (and later on, Turkey), he is already way behind the eight-ball when it comes to stopping a synthetic version of the Black Plague about to sweep the planet.
Therefore a brain-wiped Langdon is going to have to take the longest and laughably logicfree route imaginable to prevent the outbreak.
The plague is sitting inside a sealed plastic bag on the bottom of an indoor lagoon in downtown Istanbul, and can only be activated by mobile phone from a few metres away.
This is no spoiler: but as far as final-act doomsday devices go, this whole scenario proves about as terrifying as watching someone about to defuse a black bowling-ball bomb.
Then there is the ropey role played here by the World Health Organisation.
Do they really have a secret squad of guntoting commandos operating outside of international law? And a fleet of private jets to scramble them from one picturesque hotspot to the next? They do now. Get used to it.
And what about the shadowy mob known as The Consortium, which Inferno reveals is able to kill, inject or lobotomise any citizen of the free world from their HQ on a boat in the middle of the ocean? Don’t ask.
So it goes for the whole of Inferno — take any of this at face value, and you really should be taking something to prevent plague-like symptoms of your own.