What a flaming disaster!
Dan Brown’s Inferno is ludicrously silly and — even with Tom Hanks as its star — utterly charmless
NOT even the posters on the sides of buses seem to be trying very hard to make us see Inferno.
The Da Vinci Code and Angels And Demons ‘were just the beginning’, they proclaim, which sounds far more like a threat than an enticement to those of us who fought to stay awake during the first two adaptations of Dan Brown’s bestselling novels.
Sure enough, Inferno offers more of the same: preposterous plotting without the saving grace of a tongue anywhere near a cheek. While I yield to no one in my admiration for Tom Hanks, the role of iconologist Dr Robert Langdon has from the start appeared almost programmed to circumvent his most appealing qualities as an actor.
Langdon, unlike Hanks, is not someone you’d particularly want to share a plate of antipasti with. And not just because of the likelihood of ending up as collateral damage in the latest attempt to assassinate him.
At the start of Inferno — directed, like the other two films in the series, by Ron Howard — Langdon wakes up in a Florence hospital bed suffering terrible visions of hell and wondering what (the hell) he’s doing there. He’s not sure about anything, except the credentials of the pretty doctor, Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones), attending to him.
Why an improbably young and sexy English woman should be wielding a stethoscope in an Italian hospital is the only question that should occur to him, yet the only one that doesn’t. Maybe he thinks she belongs in Italy because she’s called Sienna. Anyway, Langdon has problems beyond his visions and memory loss so acute that he’s forgotten the word for coffee (‘It’s brown,’ he says), not least in the form of the sinister female cop trying to put a bullet in his head. HEAVIES
with machine guns are after him and Sienna, too, and you’d swear they were from Smersh or the CIA or some other menacing outfit, until it turns out that they are on the payroll of . . . the World Health Organisation. I told you it was preposterous.
And wait, it gets sillier still. After all, it’s Brown, as Langdon might say. A nutty billionaire called Bertrand Zobrist ( Ben Foster) has hurled himself off a medieval bell tower having left a terrifying legacy: a plague-virus that, when released, will wipe out half of humanity.
Which half is another question not answered, but never mind. Suffice to say that Zobrist thought he had the planet’s best interests at heart, a drastic short-term cull to ease the long-term dangers of over-population.
This being a Brown story, there are clues to the whereabouts of the deadly virus in various Renaissance paintings, and in the works of the 13th-century poet Dante.
Langdon must solve them while also working out which of the other worried-looking people, including his old flame Elizabeth ( Sidse Babett Knudsen) and a shady cove called Harry (Irrfan Khan), are on the side of righteousness.
By now we have moved from Florence to Venice and on to Istanbul, for no apparent reason other than to indulge Brown’s fondness for major European tourist destinations.
Of course, arbitrary Euro- locations and daft, convoluted plots are often prime ingredients in entertaining action films; where would Bond and Bourne be without them?
But, with the exception of Khan’s engagingly hammy performance, there’s scarcely a whit of charm or fun in Inferno, which drags on for two increasingly painful hours.
I commend it only for teaching me one thing I didn’t know ( that the word quarantine comes from the Italian for 40, ‘quaranta’, after the medieval practice of isolating ships and crew for 40 days), and for a single belly laugh, when the entire denouement pivots around the unforeseen absence of a mobile phone signal.
I won’t spoil the ending by letting on whether the future’s bright for Dr Robert Langdon, but I can confirm that it’s definitely not Orange. AMERICAN HONEY is even longer than Inferno, but much, much more deserving of your time. The writer- director is Andrea Arnold, who comes from Kent, but whose soul seems to belong to the American Midwest.
Arnold hasn’t made a movie in the U.S. before, but you’d never know it. She has a wonderful eye for the flotsam and jetsam of American society, and for its blue- collar architecture of rundown trailer parks and decrepit motels.
Like her best-known film, 2009’s Fish Tank, American Honey focuses on a teenage girl already kicked in the teeth by life.
In this case, it’s Star (a truly brilliant performance by newcomer Sasha Lane), who escapes her squalid existence and abusive stepfather by joining a travelling gang of misfits and deadbeats, collecting for dubious charities and selling ‘magazine subscriptions’ door to door.
The gang head to Kansas City, which they call KC, but
they are a very odd kind of sunshine band. Outrageously amoral, yet beguilingly energetic, they are led by the Fagin-like Krystal (splendidly played by Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough). She discourages romantic liaisons on the basis that they are ‘bad for business’. But Star has already fallen under the spell of Krystal’s protege and occasional bedmate Jake (Shia LaBeouf, who doubtless indulged his fondness for method acting by not washing for weeks on end), making this film a love story as well as a road movie. It’s exquisitely observed, with a great soundtrack, and is at times unbearably tense, as when Star is picked up by three cowboys whose intentions seem far from honourable. I wasn’t sure about the wildlife motif — recurring shots of birds, bees, butterflies, wasps — but maybe Arnold’s intention is to contrast the purity of nature with the mess made by human beings. Whatever, it’s an absorbing portrayal of America’s underbelly — and, frankly, if you don’t give short shrift to any tattooed or dreadlocked charity worker who happens to ask for two minutes of your time just after you’ve seen this, then you’re a better person than me.