Review of Inferno (2016) by Patrick L — 29 Jan 2017

"Like a shattered Mona Lisa painting, "Inferno" just doesn't hold itself together".

Movie Review: Inferno.

Date Viewed: November 15 2016.

Directed By Ron Howard (The Da Vinci Code, Apollo 13, Frost/Nixon, The Dilemma, A Beautiful Mind, Rush, Angels & Demons and How the Grinch Stole Christmas).

Screenplay By David Koepp, Based on the novel by Dan Brown.

Starring: Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Ben Foster, Irrfan Khan, Omar Sy, Sidse Babett Knudsen and Ana Ularu.

Unlike many of my fellow critics, I actually enjoyed "The Da Vinci Code". Tom Hanks might've had a silly hairdo but I was intrigued by the mystery and controversy surrounding it and Hanks did a pretty good job as Robert Langdon. Three years later in 2009, Hanks and director Ron Howard of course made a sequel called "Angels & Demons", I wasn't bored by it but it didn't have much of the hype or sense of intrigue "The Da Vinci Code" had. Seven years later, Hanks and Howard are at again and the third installment in author Dan Brown's amazingly successful series couldn't come out at a worse time. 2016 has truly been a good year for awfully rigged elections and sequels nobody asked for.

"The Da Vinci Code" series is known for having complicated plots involving religious conspiracies, the Holy Grail and Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene getting married and producing a daughter in the process. The Roman Catholic Church railed against the film but it became massive box office success grossing over $750 million worldwide. "Angels & Demons" didn't make as much but it was still a financial success anyway. "Inferno" on the other hand is making significantly less money than it's previous predecessors and no wonder, the movie-going public has lost interest in Brown.

Hanks is still one of the most likeable actors working today. He can also still make crowd-pleasers like "Sully" but he should've looked at the seven-year gap between this movie and "Angels & Demons" and analyze why nobody is going in droves for Dan Brown movies anymore. "Inferno" is mostly set in Florence, Italy where Harvard professor Robert Langdon (Hanks) wakes up in a hospital bed having no memory of what transpired during his visit. He also keeps having visions of an apocalyptic wasteland where inferno is raging everywhere and demons are plaguing the Earth.

Langdon gets a visit from Dr. Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones, from "The Theory of Everything") who tends to him and reveals that he has a bullet wound to the head which results in him getting amnesia. Suddenly, they are on the run from an assassin, Vayentha (Ana Ularu) and go into hiding in her apartment. When Langdon retreats to his personal belongings, he finds a "Faraday pointer", a miniature image projector which uncovers a solidified version of Sandro Botticelli's Map of Hell which is based on "Dante's Inferno".

This freaky clue leads to videos from billionaire geneticist Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) who believed that incalculable events would be necessary to reduce Earth's growing human population. Zobrist committed suicide after he was chased by government agents and now Langdon and Brooks believe that somebody else is out to finish what Zobrist started. Zobrost became obsessed with Dante and he created a virus named "Inferno" and if it were unleashed in a populated city, it has the potential to spread all over the world and cause billions of deaths.

With Zobrist now dead, Langdon and Brooks are desperate to find the clues and evade from the assassin and government agents led by Christoph Bouchard (Omar Sy). "Inferno" has an intriguing mystery on display but it never fully wraps itself together and the acting is pretty mediocre. The only actor who walks away unscathed here is Irrfan Khan who plays the CEO of a private security company. He gets more laughs and development compared to the main protagonists in this movie.

The screenplay by David Koepp (Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, Jurassic Park, Panic Room, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds) is complicated to follow and it gets more preposterous with each plot twist it follows. Like a shattered Mona Lisa painting, "Inferno" just doesn't hold itself together.