Inferno is the third installment of Dan Brown’s popular series after The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. In the past 10 years I’ve been a film critic, I haven’t given a Tom Hanks movie a negative review. As of now, I’m sad to report that track record as well as my heart is now broken. This latest entry proves to be a messy, chaotic, incomprehensible disaster.
Hanks returns as Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist who’s in Florence and wakes up in a hospital after suffering a bout of amnesia. He’s tended to by a female doctor (Felicity Jones) and then soon discovers he’s a target for assassination. The two escape the hospital and prowl around Italy trying to understand why someone wants Langdon dead.
When the doctor finds Langdon’s belongings, she finds an object that contains an image of Dante’s Inferno, the modern conception of Hell itself. They later discover that a secret organization is planning to disperse a virus which will exterminate the world’s population. Ben Foster plays a geneticist intent on solving the world’s overpopulation problem.
Langdon’s troubles are further deepened when he becomes a suspect in stealing Dante’s Death Mask. This of course leads to chases throughout with time out for needlessly complicated exposition the characters think is a lot more believable than we do.
Director Ron Howard has done great films before and no doubt will do them again, but he should stay far away from this series now. I didn’t think the first two movies were great, but they were preposterously entertaining enough. This one just turns up the heat by being frenetically fast-paced: It does so much and yet it so little of interest actually happens.
I think it’s appropriate that this movie centers around Dante’s Inferno because this film in terms of its execution would be close to the seventh circle. Last week, Tom Cruise gave us a subpar film with Jack Reacher. Now its Tom Hanks giving us something that is a very unfortunate misfire in his otherwise extraordinary career.
Grade: D
(Rated PG-13 for sequences of action and violence, disturbing images, some language, thematic elements and brief sensuality.)
