Movie Review: 'Inferno'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- What can Brown do for you?
Well, if it's Dan Brown, the author hereby offers up a third novel to be turned into a psychological suspense thriller in The Da Vinci Code series from director Ron Howard starring Tom Hanks.
But is this a case of going once too often to the well?
Inferno it's called, and it follows 2006's The Da Vinci Code and 2009's Angels & Demons in the internationally popular franchise featuring Hanks as Harvard professor and symbology expert Robert Langdon.
This time out, Langdon wakes up in a hospital in Florence with amnesia, a head wound, and apocalyptic visions, which he battles as he tries to stop mad billionaire bioterrorist Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) from using Dante's 14th-century description of hell and a doomsday virus to further his plot for global destruction as a cure for the planet's overpopulation.
Why and how Langdon has gotten where he is is a fog to him, but at least he has help in attempting to outrun the manhunt currently underway with him as the target.
That comes from Dr. Sienna Brooks, played by Felicity Jones, who not only treats Langdon medically but helps him escape and search through Renaissance artwork for clues in an intricate riddle (a Brown trademark) as well as in Dante's epic poem as a way to solve this mystery.
Veteran Howard (Apollo 13, Parenthood, In the Heart of the Sea), who won the Best Director Oscar for A Beautiful Mind and was nominated for Frost/Nixon, works from an adapted screenplay by David Koepp, who also co-scripted Angels & Demons, offering a narrative that flirts with what we can only hope is preposterousness.
Regardless, Howard and Koepp's storytelling abilities have let them down.
Again.
Howard's The Da Vinci Code, a middling murder mystery of Biblical proportions that found Langdon tracing Christ's bloodline, was a faithful adaptation of Brown's page turner, a cerebral but inconsistent, somber, and talky thriller.
The first sequel, Angels & Demons, was closer to a pure action thriller in which Langdon helped save the Vatican from catastrophe. But it went from merely improbable in the early going to over-the-top third act preposterous, and was consequently more exhausting than exciting.
Inferno, during which you never stop noticing a tired formula being applied and played out, features lots and lots of running, awkwardly dispensed exposition, and unconvincing action sequences.
In what is essentially a cat-and-mouse game, Langdon must piece together a Dante-driven puzzle and scavenger hunt -- to save the world from the deadly virus.
One big credibility problem is that Hanks' Langdon seems to operate more as a trained secret agent than as a sedentary academic.
And the second half of the film sports a few too many reversals, contrivances, and contradictions, and a third-act climax that's busy and little else.
On balance, this third entry -- arguably the weakest of the three, but not by much -- lands with about the same quality and impact as its two predecessors, which is to say: limited at best.
So we'll try to recall 2 stars out of 4 for the sometimes ridiculous, stakes-couldn't-be-higher third installment in the Da Vinci Code series, Inferno.
Capsule review: more of the same.
