Inferno is a lethargic, stupid adaptation of Dan Brown’s 2013 novel of the same name. It’s the third movie in Ron Howard’s now 10-year-long series of Brown adaptations, all of which focus on professor of “symbology” Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks). This time around, Langdon is embroiled in a plot to cull the world’s population by half. Also, he has amnesia after waking up in a hospital bed with a head wound.
It’s unclear stepping into Inferno who exactly Langdon is, as a character: He has an encyclopedic knowledge of history, yet mistakenly states that plague doctors during the Black Death wore beak masks. He has a photographic memory, but takes an excruciating amount of screentime to puzzle out an anagram. This all seems to track with Brown’s uniquely crap record as an author, but doesn’t translate into much of a leading man.
Hanks’s approach to playing Langdon is—well, I can only call it eyebrowsy. He blubbers and panics his way through a lot of early scenes, spouting bullshit lines like “The circles of Hell have been rearranged” and “I know why I am in Florence.”
He’s not helped by, essentially, playing against a single other actor: Felicity Jones, as Sienna Brooks, a nurse who helps Langdon flee his pursuers. That she turns out to be not quite what she says she is is no surprise given the lack of other contenders.
The first half of Inferno consists of sleepy foot chases and sleepier banter; Howard and scriptwriter David Koepp don’t bother to define any of the people pursuing Langdon and Brooks until much later in the film, stopping dead for a seemingly endless parade of flashbacks, monologues, and hastily sketched backstory. The shining light in the cast is Irrfan Khan (Life of Pi) selling the shit out of his role as a no-nonsense security consultant.
Below-the-line, there’s not a lot to recommend Inferno. It’s shot on location, which is nice, but Howard is uninterested in defining any of the film’s architecturally rich spaces beyond “tall” and “big.” DP Salvatore Totino turns in exceptionally sloppy work full of mismatched 180° lines and dull medium shots, all edited into a hyperactive slurry. Hans Zimmer shamelessly plagiarizes himself with an utterly faceless score. There’s a bunch of shitty ADR and corny apocalyptic visions (rendering Dante’s Hell via I Am Legend) that serve no purpose.
With its bizarrely lopsided narrative structure, generic technical contributions, and utter lack of momentum, Inferno is a painfully long 121 minutes. It is also, somehow, the shortest of these Howard/Brown collaborations! Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate indeed.
Inferno
1.5 of 5 stars
Directed by Ron Howard
Starring Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Irrfan Khan, Ben Foster, and Omar Sy
This article appears in Oct 27 – Nov 3, 2016.
