Movie Review—Inferno

Inferno

by Peter J. O'Connell                                                                                                                                              

Inferno. Released: Oct. 2016. Runtime: 121 mins. MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of action and violence, disturbing images, some language, thematic elements and brief sensuality.

A character played by Tom Hanks tosses and turns restlessly in bed, suffering nightmarish visions. Is it Captain Chesley Sullenberger, the heroic pilot played by Hanks in Sully, a fact-based film still on local screens? No, it's Robert Langdon, professor of “symbology” at Harvard, in Inferno, the third movie starring Hanks made from a Dan Brown novel.

As in the two previous movies, The DaVinci Code (2005) and Angels and Demons (2008), Langdon, dashing from historic landmark to historic landmark, has to figure out preposterously abstruse clues based on classic artistic and literary works in order to reveal “profound truths,” or save lives, even in Inferno, much of the human race itself. 

In Inferno Langdon's tossing and turning in a Florence hospital apparently stems from a head wound that also has caused him to lose his memory of the last few days. Dr. Sienna Miller (Felicity Jones) is helping Langdon when Vayentha (Ana Ularu), an assassin, shows up. This starts Langdon's dashing (accompanied by the lovely Miller) as he attempts to recover his memory and find out why Vayentha and other folks apparently are trying to kill him. 

Clues from Dante's Inferno, Botticelli's Map of Hell, the Boboli Gardens, Vasari's The Battle of Marciano, Dante's Death Mask and other highlights of Western Civilization lead Langdon and Miller to a riddle left by a scientist named Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster), who, before committing suicide, developed a plague virus that will kill off a large portion of the world's people in order to quickly solve what Zobrist believes to be an impending crisis caused by overpopulation.

After some adventures in Venice, with some friends revealed to be enemies and vice versa, the movie's convoluted plot moves on to a climax at the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. By this time the absurdity of it all may have led some members of the audience to toss and turn restlessly and others, perhaps, to doze off—a possibility that the dull direction by Ron Howard does not foreclose, despite the exertions of Hanks, the loveliness of Jones and the tours of Florence, Venice and Istanbul.