Inferno
Director: Ron Howard
Talent: Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Irrfan Khan, Ben Foster
Release date: 14th October
In the supremely daft third adaptation of Dan Brown’s novels featuring the insufferable Professor Robert Langdon (Hanks), our protagonist wakes in a Florence hospital bed with a superficial gunshot wound to the head and no memory of the previous three days. Along with clever, feisty and of course much younger doctor Sienna Brooks (Jones), he soon finds himself chasing Dante-themed clues in a race against time to discover the location of a deadly virus engineered by billionaire Bertrand Zobrist (Foster) as a drastic solution to the problem of the planet’s overpopulation.
It is actually quite impressive how director Ron Howard manages to build on the film’s preposterous premise, adding one absurd development after the other until the whole thing culminates in a sort of perfect storm of stupidity. Performances all round are no more than adequate, which is all that the material really requires, and the Florence, Venice and Istanbul locations look very pretty indeed. Mildly diverting and completely disposable.
Words – Felipe Deakin
