Inferno (2016)

Let’s be very clear about one thing: although the Dan Brown “Robert Langdon” series has always tried to be Indiana Jones for the art history crowd, I can’t say that the films have been as first-rate as Raiders of the Lost Ark or as transcendently resplendent as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. (The books do manage to capture a striking breakneck pace for prose, such that I do have a hard time putting them down, though I now wonder how much of that is due to the fact that each chapter ends on a cliffhanger.) At any rate, I liked The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons well enough at the time, playing along with the outlandish plots and high-profile performances, but Inferno is the third and hopefully last in the series, a spiral of utter rubbish that manages to be muddy, dull, and unpalatably preposterous.

Tom Hanks is back as Robert Langdon, the jack-of-all-trades academic whose expertise on Dante Alighieri is brought to bear when a dead futurist (Ben Foster) releases a warning that a plague will be unleashed on the world, bringing about an apocalypse intended to curb the earth’s growing population. Felicity Jones, late of Rogue One, plays Sienna Brooks, Langdon’s physician who becomes embroiled in the hunt for the plague after treating an amnesiac Langdon for an unremembered head injury.

I read Inferno a whole year and several dozen other books ago, so my memory of it is a little fuzzy, but I recall at least modestly enjoying it, even if the ending was utter claptrap. The good news, I suppose, is that the ending has changed for the film version, although a good number of things have also changed, evidently because they’d simply take too long. There are whole subplots excised from the novel, and while I’ll never be the guy who says a movie must match the book verbatim, the effect of these omissions is such that the movie starts to crumble into procedure. Rather than follow the puzzle-box mentality of the previous films, where it seemed clearer why we had to go from Point A to Point B, plotlines don’t materialize so much as arrive like leaden parachutists. There’s a particularly egregious moment – well, two, now that I think of it – where the film “reveals” that something we thought we’d seen was actually something else all along, and although I remember those moments coming off a little more effectively in the novel, the film deposits them with minimal buildup and next-to-no fanfare, as if to say, “Oh, time for the twist. Here you go.”

Part of the reason the film doesn’t feel like it’s following a strain of logic is that it’s not comprised of puzzle pieces weaved from preexisting artwork so much as Dan Brown has come up with his own maze, a path devised by the film’s antagonist to lead to the plague – which is inherently nutty, because if the goal is to release a plague, a plague which would be time-released whether you find it or not, why on earth would you point a colossal neon sign in its direction? Why put a ticking clock on the thing? Moreover, why tell anyone at all? This sort of plot works better when it’s an ancient mystery designed to be read by the initiated, but it’s a bit of a headscratcher why this story exists in the first place, other than to give Tom Hanks something to do for two hours; heaven knows Langdon is a busy enough man, a career symbologist with a newfound expertise in Dante studies alongside a reputation that draws the World Health Organization to enlist his help.

And speaking of the World Health Organization, hold onto your plague masks, because there’s a ludicrous diversion from the novel in that the film posits a foregoing romantic relationship between Langdon and the WHO’s director (Sidse Babett Knudsen, who you might recognize from her stint on Westworld). I’m not miffed that screenwriter David Koepp has expanded the role of this character or even tried to humanize Langdon a little beyond being a human decoder ring. But in a franchise that has seemed to pride itself on outlandish leaps in logic, this one takes the cake because it contributes nothing to the plot and goes literally nowhere, approaching character development but turning tail and thinking better of it.

As I recall, the first two Robert Langdon films had some semblance of suspense, some air of mystery that demanded solving. Inferno, however, ends up fairly boilerplate, with an attempt to reinvent the formula by giving Langdon amnesia and forcing him to piece it together along with us, but the payoffs are increasingly absurd and the twists uninspired. With Hanks at 60 and director Ron Howard joining that galaxy far, far away, it might be better to let Inferno burn out the franchise before a geriatric Langdon is called upon to solve the dispiriting mystery of who stole his oatmeal from the retirement home.

Inferno is rated PG-13 for “sequences of action and violence, disturbing images, some language, thematic elements and brief sensuality.” Directed by Ron Howard. Written by David Koepp. Based on the novel by Dan Brown. Starring Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Omar Sy, Irrfan Khan, Sidse Babett Knudsen, and Ben Foster.