Inferno (2016)

INFERNO

• Director Ron Howard
• Writer David Koepp
• Stars Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Irrfan Khan, Ben Foster
• Run time: 121 mins
• • Read IMDB review here

Say hello to the 10th circle of hell

Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones sprint fetchingly round Florence in a bid to stop half the world getting killed in this horrifically dull Dan Brown thriller

Purgatorio is maybe closer to it – something bad is happening, not the full Inferno, but it could be the gateway to the Paradiso of this fantastically boring film actually coming to an end. After 121 theologically unfathomable minutes. And after the dumbest and most anti-climactic oh-my-God-I-can’t-get-a-signal-on-my-cellphone moment in film history. There’s a lot of people frowning, running about in tourist locations, frowning, driving cars, firing guns, talking on the phone, frowning, but at the end the block is stubbornly unbusted.

Here is the third Dan Brown film, after The Da Vinci Code, and Angels and Demons, but it now seems an awfully long time since his super-tourist semiology thrillers were in any way hot. All the excitement has long since transferred to girls on trains or 50 shades of grey. These bestsellers’ emphasis on culture and art history is refreshingly high-minded in a way, but it has long since dawned on fans and non-fans alike that his wildly silly stories and their concealed clues won’t lead you to anything exciting or insightful about Christianity or the Renaissance any more than Platform 9 3/4 at King’s Cross will lead you to a school for wizards. What you’re left with is story and character and both are as flat as old, cold pancakes.

Tom Hanks is back – his capacity for wit and ironic charm once again wasted on the role of Dr Robert Langdon, an academic who is sort of a brainier, duller Indiana Jones. He awakens, after a very boring apocalyptic dream-vision, in a Florentine hospital suffering from a head injury and amnesia. So not only will he have to piece together the upcoming puzzle in the usual way but he will have to piece together his own role in it from the shattered remains of his memory.

It seems that crazy bearded biotech billionaire Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) has become obsessed with humanity’s imminent demise through overpopulation. He also believes that the thinning-out process caused by The Black Death gave humanity the breathing space to create the Renaissance. So he has created a huge poison-bomb which will cull 50% of people. But does he just detonate it? Corks no. He hides it before topping himself and he’s left a trail of clues embedded in Botticelli’s illustrations of Dante! The tiresome pedant.

Soon, flinching and wincing with that awful head pain of his, Dr Langdon is on the case, and of course he has a doe-eyed helpmeet – Sienna, a super-smart hospital doctor played by Felicity Jones. There are many apparently sinister and ruthless people after the secret too – and after Langdon. There is Dr Elizabeth Sinskey (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Christoph, a tough guy secretly employed by the WHO - the World Health Organisation, not the supergroup – to find this bio-device. But who are the good guys?

Soon Hanks and Jones are running through swarms of tourists and gap yah students in Florence and Venice – often finding it very easy to blag their way into super-important art galleries and places of worship where they must decipher weird fragments of sub-Hallmark poetry from centuries lost. Once upon a time, this wackiness had some novelty value. Now it’s tedious.

Read full review at The Guardian

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Irrfan Khan is the saving grace of this ride through hell

Tom Hanks, Irrfan Khan-starrer is an adaptation of Dan Brown's torturous novel. The only improvement it has on the book is that it ends in two hours.

Inferno movie cast: Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Irrfan Khan, Omar Sy, Ben Foster, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Ana Ularu, Ida Darvish, Cesare Cremonini
Inferno movie Director: Ron Howard

There are moments which justify the destruction of Earth and culling its population by half, like when this Armageddon can end Inferno. Ron Howard’s adaptation of Dan Brown’s torturous novel by the same name just added another level to hell, and Dante would agree. The only improvement the film manages over the book is that it finishes in two hours.

The fact that it stars accomplished actors like Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones makes the transgression even worse. Hanks’ talent for irony is wasted, Jones simply can’t decide what expressions go with the ill-written role. There is Irrfan Khan too, the only one among the cast who is having some fun and it is apparent. His Provost is in on the joke and makes the film tolerable. For the moments of levity he brings to Inferno, we can even forgive him The Amazing Spider-Man.

Now for the plot which has holes the size of potholes on Indian roads during monsoon. A psychopath billionaire has created a plague modelled on Black Death. Within two days it will kill half the world’s population and Hanks’ Robert Langdon is the only one who can stop it. The only trouble is he had retrograde amnesia and can’t even remember what you drink in the morning and is brown (Ting: Coffee). Never has the world’s chances of survival been so slim.

Helping him along is Jones’ brilliant doctor. On their tail is a secret organisation headed by Khan’s Provost. There is also World Health Organisation which is more badass CIA with drones and guns.

Caught in the middle is art and theology, Dante’s definition of hell and Botticelli. By the time the film ends, they would all be convoluted beyond recognition. But you wouldn’t care because you are busy praying that Dan Brown shouldn’t write yet another Robert Langdon-saves-the-world novels. It is time he and his Mickey Mouse watch take a long break in Cambridge.

Read full review at The Indian Express

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Inferno: Definitely not hot as hell

With its fast pace and gorgeous locations, Ron Howard’s latest is only pretty to watch

If you live in India, overpopulation is a malady you’re pretty much used to, in spite of its grating effects. It’s not entirely unusual for people to have thoughts of mass annihilation (especially during trying traffic times). Unless they’re a psychopathic tyrant, no one actually puts these thoughts into action.

But lo and behold, that’s exactly what Inferno ’s got. Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) is a scientist so affected with the world’s population problem that he claims we’re ‘a minute to midnight’, that moment that’s frighteningly close to the extinction of the human race. Inferno , the third film in the Robert Langdon series (based on the fourth book in Dan Brown’s series) sees our protagonist (Tom Hanks) figure out Zobrist’s plan and then eventually try and save the world. In the process, he partners up with yet another pretty young thing. This time, it’s medical prodigy Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones) who joins him on his adventures.

After suddenly waking up in a hospital, Langdon is being pursued by several people. Some appear to be government agents, while another is the police-uniform-clad assassin Vayentha, and even the World Health Organisation is hot on his heels. The professor of symbology is plagued by visions of what he later discovers is Dante’s Hell. Langdon must make a quick escape with Sienna and figure out why he’s being pursued.

After several high-speed chases, eureka moments to break anagrams, and witty lines, Langdon and Sienna find that their purpose is to save the world from a deadly virus created by Zobrist, who has mysteriously committed suicide. Then there’s even more chasing — some in spectacularly recreated locations like the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, others on a train to Venice — quite a bit of double crossing, and plenty of riddle-solving.

I’ll be the first to admit that all of the twists and turns could have been foreseen. Even the premise of the film — saving the world from a deadly virus — isn’t exactly a novel concept. However, Inferno is well made. The film’s effects are slick, excepting one snake-bite scene, and Ron Howard’s direction has always been top notch. In the end, the live action films are just like the books they were adapted from: quick fixes to ennui . So watch it and forget it, because it’s not memorable. But Inferno is worth one viewing.

Read full review at The Hindu

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Adaptation of Dan Brown thriller fails to raise a temperature

After “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels & Demons,” who would expect “Inferno” — the latest movie to be adapted from novelist Dan Brown’s series of thrillers about globe-trotting Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon — to be anything other than schematic, silly and slightly chaotic? In those movies, we watched as Langdon (Tom Hanks) ran from one scenic international site to another, trying to solve puzzles that had been left for him at art-historical landmarks, turning the experience of moviegoing into a vicarious, somewhat brainier version of the Post Hunt and its urban-scavenger-race ilk.

The new movie, which is based on the fourth and most recent of Brown’s Langdon books, takes us from Florence to Venice to Istanbul, as our hero follows a trail of intellectual bread crumbs that has him hopping walls at the Boboli Gardens, inspecting the bronze horses on the facade of St. Mark’s Basilica and jumping into the waters of the “Sunken Palace” cistern beneath Hagia Sophia. It is everything one might imagine a Langdon adventure to be: predictable, absurd and mildly confusing.

More unforgivably, it is also plodding and unrelentingly dull, as narrative and visual travelogue.

Returning director Ron Howard gets no mileage from the tale’s picturesque settings, turning them into a rote slideshow of someone else’s whirlwind European vacation. Only the post-apocalyptic visions that spring from Langdon’s fevered imagination — after he wakes up in a Florence hospital suffering from head trauma that has left him amnesiac for 48 hours and hallucinating — are the least bit watchable. And writer David Koepp, who also adapted “Angels & Demons,” fails to find room in the screenplay for wit, despite self-aware jabs at Langdon’s reputation as a stuffy old blowhole.

“You talk too much,” says a former love interest (Sidse Babett Knudsen), accurately. At another point, the young doctor (Felicity Jones) who rescues Langdon after an assassin (Ana Ularu) starts shooting at him in his hospital bed jokes about his old-school research methods. “Copy of the book?” she cracks, after Langdon suggests digging up a copy of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” to solve a clue left by a colleague. “That’s quaint. I use Google.” Other than that, “Inferno” takes itself way too seriously, even for a movie in which the quarry is a ticking time bomb in the form of a virus that, once unleashed, will kill half the planet.

As Langdon and his new doctor friend dart about Europe in search of the bug, which was engineered by a deranged biotech whiz named Zobrist (Ben Foster), they’re pursued by a swarm of others. These include a team of commandos from the World Health Organization led by a man with questionable loyalties (Omar Sy) and a shifty operative (Irrfan Khan) from a mysterious organization with ties to Zobrist and the hospital assassin. At least Khan, whose character carries a knife up his sleeve like a James Bond villain, seems to be having fun.

There is one surprising plot twist, for those who haven’t read the book. Those who have, however, will probably be disappointed that Koepp has altered the novel’s dark climax — which is rendered as a jumble of unengaging action and incoherent fight choreography — rather significantly, in ways that cater to popular sentiment about happy endings.

Say what you will about Dan Brown’s books. They may be, as some have noted, poorly written, formulaic and pretentious. But at least they hold a reader’s attention, in ways that this excursion — as sleep-inducing and rigidly predictable as a train ride — does not.

Read full article at The washington post

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Breathlessly Globe-Trotting and Decoding to Save the World

Late in “Inferno,” Tom Hanks blurts out, “My God, this is a labyrinth.” Well, of course it is, because Mr. Hanks is running (and running) through another muddled Dan Brown maze. Once again, this one comes to you from the director Ron Howard and his producing partner, Brian Grazer, who bring clenched-jaw commitment and a whole mess of filmmaking to every project, even the most disposable. In this case, the story may not make any sense, but they’re going to throw so much at you — so many jumpy moves, so many tangled threads — that you might not notice (or care).

Certainly Mr. Hanks, slipping back into the role of the so-called symbologist Robert Langdon for a third time, is a master of that great Hollywood sleight of hand in which a big star beguiles you so artfully that you don’t see (or simply ignore) the deception. In Mr. Hanks’s case, this legerdemain depends on his natural appeal, which has deepened as he’s settled into stardom, as well as his ability to bring remarkable characters down to earth. That’s especially crucial with a civilian superhero like Langdon, one of those preposterously capable types who wears professorial threads instead of a cape and excels at cracking gnarly codes rather than bad-guy heads.

One of the obvious draws of civilian champions, those latter-day Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys, is that they’re inordinately, at times vulnerably, ordinary until they start doing their special thing. So when Langdon first appears in a hospital bed in “Inferno,” groaning in pain amid the woozy camerawork, you’re ready to put a cold compress on his (or, really, Mr. Hanks’s) head. There’s no time. As a director, Mr. Howard tends to be a lead foot, either because he likes it like that (as in his racing movie “Rush”) or knows that one of the smarter ways to handle certain material is to sprint through its twists. Here, he skips ready and set, and just goes.

As in the first movies (“The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels & Demons”), Langdon is called on to furrow his brow and fire up his genius to solve a puzzle. The main pieces in “Inferno” include a lethal virus and a megalomaniacal billionaire (Ben Foster), who apparently took his TED Talk too seriously. There’s a shadowy security firm with an enigmatic owner (an amusing Irrfan Khan, who’s ready for Bond villainy) and the World Health Organization, which has been given a sexy makeover with enigmatic players (Omar Sy, Sidse Babett Knudsen) and fleets of gun-toting paramilitaries. There are flying bullets and drones, racing characters and cameras, nods to Dante and Botticelli.

Mr. Hanks, who changes young female sidekicks in this series more than he seems to switch jackets, keeps company in this movie with Felicity Jones, as Sienna Brooks, a lethally earnest doctor. She’s at his side in the hospital and soon on the run with him, chasing and being chased while finding clues in destination sites like the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. As in a lot of globe-trotting thrillers, these (mostly real) locations are attractive backdrops for the frenetically spinning story and characters. Like the references to classical literature and art, they are also meant to class up the joint, adding some high-culture luster to the pulp.

Part of the draw of these movies is that they don’t create beauty, but instead borrow the emotions of the beauty they depict. (This, more or less, is one definition of kitsch, courtesy of the philosopher Tomas Kulka.) That makes the movies easy to watch and easy to forget. As important, their postcard beauty and rented emotions also attenuate some of the less palatable aspects of their conspiracy theories. There’s pleasure in watching characters solve puzzles and turn hunches into facts, yet when scaled up — out of crime labs and onto the global stage — all that problem-solving suggests it’s only supermen like Langdon’s brainiac who can save the world.

This savior complex is familiar but it also creates an argument about belief. Unlike in the earlier movies, the Roman Catholic Church is a supporting player in “Inferno,” largely evident in landmarks and cultural touchstones rather than cults and murderous agents. (The script is by David Koepp.) Even so, skepticism about deep faith remains, most obviously in the billionaire’s deranged belief and in the image of bomb-wielding fanatics. By the end, the story has shifted to Turkey and a dubiously coded landscape dotted with minarets, crescents and stars. It’s there that this doomsday fantasy reaches a frothing, hysterical climax and offers deliverance of a kind, once again with a savior right from a promised land called Hollywood.
Read full article at New york times
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Latest Dan Brown adaptation starring Tom Hanks goes down in flames

We must remember this: Movie stars such as James Stewart, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, Denzel Washington, Katharine Hepburn, supporting ringers like Peter Lorre and Thelma Ritter — they all made heaps of movies to forget, along with the ones to remember. Generations from now, when we're watching Turner Classic Movies and the three Dan Brown movies starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard rotate onto the schedule, it'll be like: Oh, yeah. Those. I'd forgotten about those movies.

Howard and Hanks, two exceptional craftsmen and born entertainers, have somehow turned out a third adventure featuring author Brown's renowned symbologist and world-saving dullard Robert Langdon that is precisely on the beam, boringwise, as "The Da Vinci Code" (2006) and "Angels and Demons" (2009).

In "Inferno," which, believe me, has no disco in it whatsoever, we begin with Langdon, freaking out and bleeding from the head in a hospital in Florence, Italy. He has no idea how he got there. He's afflicted by horrible visions of the apocalypse — rivers of blood, fire, etc. — inspired by Dante's "Divine Comedy," the "Inferno" part, the one imagining the precise cliques and subsections of hell.

Langdon's attending doctor, a British sphinx played by Felicity Jones, notes that he's suffering from head trauma. (Thanks, doc, glad there's no copay for that & brilliant medical diagnosis.) Langdon's other symptoms include amnesia, headaches, disorientation, frenzied editing and relentless shaky-Paul Greengrass"Bourne Ultimatum" camera technique. In other words, he shouldn't be operating the heavy machinery of the story about to unfold.

Screenwriter David Koepp does what he did with "Angels and Demons," which is to respect the dutiful, page-turning grandiosity of the source material while hustling everybody to the next world capital as efficiently as possible. A billionaire biotech whiz (glowerin' Ben Foster), darling of the TED talk circuit, has created a Black Death-type plague that, when loosed upon the world, will wipe out half the global population. "Maybe pain can save us," he says in the prologue.

So it's off to the races, with Howard shooting on location in Florence, Venice, Istanbul and, for the majority of the filming, Budapest doubling for various locales. The clues to the whereabouts of the plague detonation device lie in Botticelli's "Map of Hell" and other high-toned "Where's Waldo?" equivalents. Those joining or obstructing Langdon in his race against time, and his attempts to win the gold in the Olympic sport of exposition-hurling, include the World Health Organization director (Sidse Babett Knudsen, the picture's chief performance asset), with a sort-of romantic history with Langdon, and a ruthless assassin (Ana Ularu) working for "the Consortium," a private security firm in cahoots with the biotech crazy man. Irrfan Khan plays the man heading up the Consortium, and he alone sneaks a modicum of wisecracking levity into a movie that, if you consult your Big Book of Synonyms and Antonyms, should be listed as the precise antonym of "wisecracking levity."

This is a franchise with lead weights tied around its ankles. The problem lies in Langdon himself, a character made up of a few telling details (that Mickey Mouse watch, for one) in search of some flesh and blood. The guy never shuts up with the art history and the meaning of everything; at one point, Jones' coolheaded doctor says: "You talk too much." (Back home, Professor Langdon's office hours must be more like office months.) I mean, yes, the setups and explanations in a Dan Brown adaptation require all sorts of information disguised as dialogue, in between reminders that there's a doomsday machine that needs tending to. But Hanks cannot activate the movie because there's nothing to activate. The character is all function and no form, all strain and distress and no buoyancy. At this point in his career, Hanks is ready and eager for challenges or, at the very least, diversions with a little more spark than this one. It's too pedestrian to be associated with a circle of hell; "Inferno" is more like a wet match.

Read full article at Chicago Tribune 

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Movie rating ★★½

Fright at the museum in ‘Inferno’

“You can expect nausea, headaches, and dizziness,” says the pert young doctor (Felicity Jones) to Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) after the latter wakes up in the hospital with a concussion. Honestly, though, “Inferno” isn’t that bad.

The third Ron Howard adaptation of Dan Brown’s best-selling books — “The Da Vinci Code” (2006) and “Angels & Demons” (2009) preceded it — is proficient, unnecessary Saturday night moviemaking. “Inferno” actually may be better than the first two movies because it doesn’t treat the source material as Gospel. It’s honestly ridiculous, a Nicolas Cage “National Treasure” puzzle-thriller with a degree in art history.

But Cage at least knows how to loony-tune his way through those movies, and the most dispiriting thing about the Robert Langdon films is how they sap the life energy out of one of our own national treasures, Tom Hanks. As the eminent, mystery-solving Harvard professor of Dan Brown’s fantasy life, Hanks furrows his brow and dashes off to the baptismal font at Il Duomo, in Florence, and gets to say things like “Yes! An anagram!” But the role is fundamental stock leading-man stuff to which the star can bring none of his subversive slyness (as he did in Spielberg’s “Bridge of Spies” and even the recent “Sully” — that bar scene, remember?).

“Inferno” is the exact cinematic equivalent of an airport paperback, which is what’s fine and forgettable about it. It begins with Langdon in that hospital in Florence, a wound to his head and no memory of how it happened. Oh, and there’s a grim-faced hit lady (Ana Ularu) on his trail, so he and the doctor, Sienna Brooks, are immediately on the run.

He has less than 24 hours to save the world from . . . well, check the title and know that the plot involves both the Middle Ages and the World Health Organization. The movie’s one long mad dash, like a cracked package tour: If it’s Tuesday, this must be Florence and Venice and Istanbul. And Dante’s Circles of Hell, and Botticelli’s painting of same, and the Hall of 500 in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio . . .

Langdon and Sienna are led toward the movie’s Doomsday end game by clues left by a wild-eyed tycoon (Ben Foster) who has inconveniently jumped to his death in the opening scene. After a while, you wonder if it wouldn’t have been easier for him to just leave a Post-It on the fridge.

There’s one good twist, though, and a few far-fetched ones, and some solid actors pop up amid the jumbly hand-held action: Jones, Foster, Omar Sy (“The Untouchables”) as a WHO cop, Sidse Babett Knudsen (“Westworld”) as his maybe-evil but maybe-not boss. Hanks hits his marks like the pro he is, and Howard and his production team give us a nice armchair tour of Italian museums, the Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul, and the gloomy waters of the Basilica Cistern beneath it.

Still, the best thing in “Inferno” — by a country mile — is Irrfan Khan (“Jurassic World,” “The Lunchbox”) as Mr. Sims, a.k.a. “The Provost,” an unflappably amoral fellow who heads up a black-ops security company headquartered in a high-tech yacht in the Adriatic. One minute he’s ordering Langdon’s assassination, the next he’s saving Langdon’s life, and Khan plays the character as a weary contractor-consultant who’s having a bad day and doesn’t have the time to explain why he’s much smarter than you.

Hanks, ever the gentleman, stands back and lets Khan steal the movie, and the Provost provides the wit “Inferno” desperately needs when he looks at a bad guy he has just dispatched and says, “Not my best work, but it’ll do for the Italians.” Can the next one of these films please be about him?

Read full review at Boston globe

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What a flaming disaster! Dan Brown's Inferno is ludicrously silly and  - even with Tom Hanks as its star - utterly charmless 

Movie rating ★★☆☆☆

Not even the posters on the sides of buses seem to be trying very hard to make us see Inferno.

The Da Vinci Code and Angels And Demons ‘were just the beginning’, they proclaim, which sounds far more like a threat than an enticement to those of us who fought to stay awake during the first two adaptations of Dan Brown’s bestselling novels.

Sure enough, Inferno offers more of the same: preposterous plotting without the saving grace of a tongue anywhere near a cheek. While I yield to no one in my admiration for Tom Hanks, the role of iconologist Dr Robert Langdon has from the start appeared almost programmed to circumvent his most appealing qualities as an actor.

Langdon, unlike Hanks, is not someone you’d particularly want to share a plate of antipasti with. And not just because of the likelihood of ending up as collateral damage in the latest attempt to assassinate him.

At the start of Inferno — directed, like the other two films in the series, by Ron Howard — Langdon wakes up in a Florence hospital bed suffering terrible visions of hell and wondering what (the hell) he’s doing there. He’s not sure about anything, except the credentials of the pretty doctor, Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones), attending to him.

Why an improbably young and sexy English woman should be wielding a stethoscope in an Italian hospital is the only question that should occur to him, yet the only one that doesn’t. Maybe he thinks she belongs in Italy because she’s called Sienna.

Anyway, Langdon has problems beyond his visions and memory loss so acute that he’s forgotten the word for coffee (‘It’s brown,’ he says), not least in the form of the sinister female cop trying to put a bullet in his head.

Heavies with machine guns are after him and Sienna, too, and you’d swear they were from Smersh or the CIA or some other menacing outfit, until it turns out that they are on the payroll of . . . the World Health Organisation. I told you it was preposterous.

And wait, it gets sillier still. After all, it’s Brown, as Langdon might say. A nutty billionaire called Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) has hurled himself off a medieval bell tower having left a terrifying legacy: a plague-virus that, when released, will wipe out half of humanity.

Which half is another question not answered, but never mind. Suffice to say that Zobrist thought he had the planet’s best interests at heart, a drastic short-term cull to ease the long-term dangers of over-population

This being a Brown story, there are clues to the whereabouts of the deadly virus in various Renaissance paintings, and in the works of the 13th-century poet Dante.

Langdon must solve them while also working out which of the other worried-looking people, including his old flame Elizabeth (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and a shady cove called Harry (Irrfan Khan), are on the side of righteousness.

By now we have moved from Florence to Venice and on to Istanbul, for no apparent reason other than to indulge Brown’s fondness for major European tourist destinations.

Of course, arbitrary Euro-locations and daft, convoluted plots are often prime ingredients in entertaining action films; where would Bond and Bourne be without them?

But, with the exception of Khan’s engagingly hammy performance, there’s scarcely a whit of charm or fun in Inferno, which drags on for two increasingly painful hours.

I commend it only for teaching me one thing I didn’t know (that the word quarantine comes from the Italian for 40, ‘quaranta’, after the medieval practice of isolating ships and crew for 40 days), and for a single belly laugh, when the entire denouement pivots around the unforeseen absence of a mobile phone signal.

I won’t spoil the ending by letting on whether the future’s bright for Dr Robert Langdon, but I can confirm that it’s definitely not Orange.

Read full review at Daily mail

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The first two Dan Brown films were often awful, but Inferno is pacy and engaging

Movie Rating ★★★★☆

Inferno is a Tom Hanks thriller, a Florence-set travelogue and a rare thing in cinema history — the third part in a movie franchise that’s actually better than the preceding instalments. You’d have to go back toThe Good, the Bad and the Ugly to find a “threequel” that so clearly outclasses its forerunners in the way that Inferno overtakes 2006’s .Those movies, based on Dan Brown bestsellers, snagged more than $1.24 billion at the box office, but very quickly, in the space of only two tales, calcified into deadening narrative clichés. They describe a Harvard professor, Robert Langdon (Hanks), whose presence is requested in a glamorous European capital (Paris or Rome). His mission is to solve a series of Renaissance art-based riddles that will help, in a race against time, to topple either a corrupt religious order or a devious cabal of faith-hating scientists (the Illuminati . Oh, and he does all this with the aid of a sassy, intelligent and much younger brunette (Audrey Tautou, then Ayelet Zurer) whom he’s picked up, by chance, along the way.The delight of Inferno is that it looks long and hard at the Brown formula — and takes a lot of liberties. It deviates from the source novel at several key points, including an entirely, and dramatically, revamped ending. It opens not with some stuffy European emissary interrupting Langdon’s routine with a plea for help but with a visceral gut-punch sequence in a Florentine hospital, where Langdon is recovering from an apparent gunshot to the head. Here the director Ron Howard, writer David Koepp and star Hanks go for the jugular, and give us short-term amnesia, skull-splitting visions and a kick-ass assassin (Ana Ularu) blasting a late-night emergency room to pieces. It’s all very Jason Bourne, but in a good way.

The camerawork too is a bit Bourne, a bit guerrilla, and full of shaky adrenalised immediacy. The camera follows Langdon, hand-held, as he’s whisked out of the hospital by, yes, a sassy, much younger brunette called Dr Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones). Hold fire, though — this Dan Brown adaptation knows exactly what you’re thinking, and toys with the idea that Brooks is another pretty Langdon groupie with romantic potential before revealing Langdon’s real female counterpart with romantic potential: a high-powered virologist, and a grown-up woman, called Dr Elizabeth Sinskey, played by Sidse Babett Knudsen.This pair, Langdon and Sinskey, will later have a beautiful, and genuinely moving, scene together on a private jet, where they reminisce about their failed relationship (“You talked too much,” she sighs, “and then not at all”). For now, though, Sinskey needs Langdon’s help in solving the riddles of a Florence-based billionaire and Dante Alighieri fan (Ben Foster) who plans to fix the world’s incipient overpopulation crisis by releasing a killer virus in 24 hours, and who also may have something to do with that bullet wound on Langdon’s head

And off they go. It’s great, silly, stupid, engrossing, occasionally meaningful fun. There’s a very brief dip in the middle, when Langdon and Brooks are chased around the Boboli gardens by a tiny surveillance drone (what’s it going to do? Get tangled in her hair?). Otherwise, though, the movie is a cavalcade of quirky supporting performances (Irrfan Khan as a covert, karate-chopping “fixer” is priceless), some typically solid work from Hanks and a lavish tourist-baiting trip through Florence itself.

Best of all, there are no boring bits when Langdon has to explain the origins of Grail lore or the legacy of papal secrecy. It’s just a hero, a madman and a bloody great big chase. How could you resist?

Read full review at The Times

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Ron Howard and Tom Hanks do perfect justice to Dan Brown's book - tragically

Movie Rating ★☆☆☆☆

Film critic Robbie Collin heard a deafening yawn in the darkness, and knew it was his own. He gazed up at the cinema screen rearing up in front of him like a terrible elephant. On it were the famous actorTom Hanks and the less famous but still reasonably famous actress Felicity Jones, dashing through the famous Italian city of Florence Italy, unwieldily dialogue flapping from their mouths like hot pigeons. . As their feet clattered across the ancient paving stones, hewn from pietraforte, an arenaceous limestone found mainly in Florence, Italy, Collin’s mind spun back 10 years, to a time when Hanks was similarly haring through Paris in The Da Vinci Code – the first of three films to be adapted from the novels of improbably successful thriller author Dan Brown.

Back then, the actress cantering along at Hanks’s side had been Audrey Tautou, who was 30 years old at the time. Collin’s interior monologue slid excitingly into Almost the same age as Jones is now Suddenly it all became clear. Jones had exactly the same tousled, shoulder-grazing brunette hair, bashful eyes and enticing pout as Tautou had in that first film.Then there was the film’s structure: a faux-glamorous sightseeing trip down some of the most beaten tracks in Europe, artificially energised with a time-bomb tick towards some kind of Biblically flavoured conspiracy-catastrophe that didn’t make a shred of sense if you stopped to think about it, which the film actively encouraged you not to.

And then, of course, the clues – pseudo-cryptic jabberings inspired by the work of great artists, writers and architects whose names the characters couldn’t even pronounce properly. It was all Collin’s mind raced like a terrible elephant. Could it be that Howard’s latest Dan Brown adaptation was really so perfunctory, so passionless, that it was recycling a 10-year-old formula that had already felt drab and dated 10 years ago?

Could it be that in the intervening decade of film culture, Howard and his returning collaborators from previous Brown adaptations – screenwriter David Koepp, cinematographer Salvatore Totino, composer Hans Zimmer – hadn’t thought of a single way to give the source material even the measliest spritz of freshness? Could it be that the only meaningful difference this time was that Hanks had been allowed a less terrible haircut? 

Pretty much, thought Collin, and flung open his laptop to hash out the same old spoof of Brown’s prose all the book critics had written ages ago. Writing about a Dan Brown film in the style of a Dan Brown novel wasn’t remotely original, thought Collin, his fingers dancing over the computer keyboard like a terrible elephant. But in a meta sort of way that was actually quite clever if you thought about it, the review’s embarrassing lack of originality was kind of the point.

That’s probably enough of that for now, though if you found five paragraphs wearing, imagine how two hours of it feels. The one thing that can’t be said about Howard’s film is that it doesn’t do justice to Brown’s book: it absolutely does, which is the entire problem, and arguably one that any halfway-faithful adaptation could never avoid. The plot involves a Dante-obsessed biologist called Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) who brews up a dirty bomb designed to half the human population and thereby save the planet in the long run.

t falls to Hanks’s Robert Langdon (a world-renowned professor of religious symbology, you’ll recall) to follow Zobrist’s breadcrumb path of riddles to the device’s off-switch – a trail which begins in a Florence hospital, where Langdon awakes one day with a gunshot graze on his scalp, a strange rash developing on his wrist, and no idea how he got there.

Jones plays his doctor, Sienna Brooks, who helps him escape a mysterious gunwoman in motorcyclist leathers (Ana Ularu), and the pair go scampering off round all the most unimaginatively shot, clangingly obvious tourist sites in town, including the Ponte Vecchio and Giardino di Boboli – or "Bobbly Gardens", as everyone calls it here – while decoding Ted Rogers-calibre conundrums and utilising supposed arcane devices like a "Faraday Pointer", which (to these non-symbologically-trained eyes at least) looked an awful lot like a pocket torch.

As before, the characters are casually preposterous: even the great Sidse Babett Knudsen, of Borgen fame, looks lost as the head of the World Health Organisation, bizarrely portrayed here as an A-Team-like international strike force. And while the plot’s endless lurches and jinks are designed to hold you in a constant state of pleasurable bafflement, the cumulative effect is desensitisation: no single thread holds long enough to give you anything to cheer for or believe in.

“Nothing changes our behaviour like pain,” growls Zobrist in his opening monologue, and given the difference in global box-office takings between The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons – from $758 million to $485 million – he may be on to something. Why anyone would want to return today for a third dose of the same is an enigma perhaps best left to the professional symbologists. 

Read full review at The Telegraph

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Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆

Ron Howard adaptation of Dan Brown scavenger hunt a children's story for adults

In this year of revivals, it's inevitable that we'd get another in Ron Howard's series of esoteric thrillers adapted from the novels of Dan Brown, with Tom Hanks returning as expert symbol decoder Professor Robert Langdon – an older, more intellectual version of Matt Damon's Jason Bourne, who similarly spends his time dashing across Europe with killers on his trail

Here the chase kicks off with Langdon waking in a hospital in Florence, with amnesia and a bleeding head. Before he can make sense of his situation, he's on the run once more, accompanied by his young doctor (Felicity Jones), whose past as a child prodigy helps with the anagrams and picture puzzles they encounter along the way.

This scavenger hunt is the kind of thing you'd find in an educational computer game, and credibility is not an issue in what is basically a children's story for adults. The plot here lacks the religious (or anti-religious) element which gave a vaguely subversive edge to previous instalments in the series, starting with The Da Vinci Code. Instead, the allusions are mostly to Dante (or "the poet Dante" as a museum curator helpfully identifies him).

Langdon is haunted by nightmares of leering demons and tortured sinners, which turn out to be bound up with a conspiracy to unleash a worldwide plague – though Howard, a middling entertainer at best, brings nothing very personal to these distorted, hallucinatory images.

Indeed, there are few ideas of any kind here, beyond the moral dilemma of whether it's worth wiping out large parts of humanity to save the planet – a question that has only one possible answer. Still, on a basic storytelling level Inferno is competent, with a cast far better than the material deserves. Irrfan Khan is the most memorable of the plotters, a pragmatic consultant whose huge, weary eyes seem to have absorbed so much that nothing can surprise him.

Going by his choice of roles over the past year or two, Hanks is just now entering his grandfather phase. Langdon is not one of his more interesting characters, but David Koepp's script allows him some realistically weary moments, especially when he's teamed with Sidse Babett Knudsen as an old flame who shares his sense of regret. Jones supplies some counterbalancing youthful energy, though her reading of one key melodramatic line – you'll know it when you hear it – briefly tips the film into outright camp.

Read Full review at Sydney Morning Herald

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Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆

Inferno is plot-hole ridden, ludicrous, preposterous nonsense — but is also occasionally good fun

IMAGINE being the curator of a hugely respected museum and opening Dan Brown’s latest Robert Langdon novel.

You skim through the plot hoping, praying, that Tom Hanks and 300 crew don’t turn up some time in the future to film a scene which will inevitably mean you having to explain to visitors for years to come that: “No, this mask is not responsible for four billion deaths” or: “No, there isn’t a secret passage underneath that tomb.”

Well, this time round it is the turn of Florence, with director Ron Howard and Tom’s third outing into Brown’s jumbled, madcap — and phenomenally successful — series of books. Inferno is obviously plot-hole ridden nonsense. For example, a great friend of Langdon goes into hiding and is never mentioned or heard of again

Swap Da Vinci for Dante and Audrey Tautou for Felicity Jones and you have exactly the same film. Were it not for Irrfan Khan shining through as a particularly sarcastic agency boss, you’d really struggle with the whole thing.

A nutter is angry about global over­population so has created a virus to destroy half the Earth’s population. Rather than walk into Westfield and just drop it on the floor in Primark, he has insisted on whatever the opposite of a treasure hunt is, via the world’s most beautiful cities with a generous 48-hour warning and a set of clues.

Langdon (Hanks), our hero, has not only lost his mullet but also his memory. This is annoying as he’s the world’s best clue solver, but luckily is led through Florence by Dr Sienna Brooks (Jones) who is also adept at solving clues.

Together they try to piece together gaps in his memory to stop this dastardly deed. This is hampered by many different baddies all after them for many different reasons. Look, you know the drill. You won’t have a blinking clue what’s going on — they reveal clues so long and complex they haven’t been seen since Anneka Rice leapt out of a helicopter back in 1986 to speak to the souvenir salesman at Wookey Hole.

There are double crosses, breathless dashes across beautiful looking cities, astonishing clue reveals and a nail-biting end.

This is ludicrous, preposterous stuff — but is also occasionally good fun. I just don’t see how this has been stretched into a third version of the same movie.

Annoyingly, the ending of the book has been “Hollywoodised” beyond recognition. Everyone involved has done the bare minimum — in this case condensing a particularly bad season of 24 into 121 minutes.

The movie the book deserves.

Read full review The sun

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