Inferno
Starring Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones
Directed by Ron Howard
It’s been seven years since author Dan Brown’s renowned symbologist, Robert Langdon (The Da Vinci Code), was last on the big screen, and his latest adventure isn’t worth the wait. Ron Howard directs Tom Hanks in the Langdon role for a third time, but showcases both his and Hanks’s myriad talents so poorly, it’s hard to imagine how Inferno was even made.
The movie opens with our hero waking up in an Italian hospital with no recollection as to how he got there. He is befriended by a mysterious doctor (Jones), and soon enough, the two are on the run after an assassin bursts in and starts shooting up the place. A globetrotting chase – involving a billionaire geneticist’s plan to unleash a deadly virus and Dante’s Divine Comedy – ensues. The results are one muddled scene after another.
The main problem is David Koepp’s insufferably hackneyed script, which takes talented actors like Hanks, Jones, Ben Foster and Irrfan Khan, and reduces them to exposition-spewing caricatures. Hanks fares particularly terribly, as he spends most of the film grimacing in pain or looking completely befuddled, but his Langdon somehow manages to solve all the tiresome and needless puzzles left for him along the way. To make matters worse, Langdon is plagued by apocalyptic visions (containing some shoddy visual effects) that kill whatever tension was barely there in the first place.
In the end, the primary frustration with Inferno is the complete lack of innovation or intrigue it has to offer in a movie landscape already full of intelligent thrillers.
