Film review: Inferno
Film & TV
Inferno is the third film in Dan Brown’s series of novels featuring symbologist Robert Langdon and serves up more of the same Indiana Jones-style treasure hunt fans have come to expect from the adaptations.
While there is a lot of entertainment in Ron Howard’s latest offering, Inferno does not have the same thrill as The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons.
Tom Hanks returns as Langdon, the Harvard professor of religious symbology, who wakes up in an Italian hospital with a head wound and temporary memory loss. As his memory gradually returns, he finds himself involved in a race to save the world from a plague that threatens half of the planet’s population.
Extremist biologist Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) believes that over-population will soon result in the extinction of humans and the demise of Earth. He decides he must take matters into his own hands and plants a biological weapon, designed to kill half the human population, in a secret location.
Zobrist commits suicide shortly after the weapon is planted, which triggers a trail of clues linked to Dante’s poetry for Zobrist’s sidekick (who is unknown to the audience until later) to follow in order to find and arm the weapon.
Langdon teams up with his doctor, Sienna (Felicity Jones), a child prodigy obsessed with Dante, who helps him recover his memories so he can follow the breadcrumbs of clues to try to reach the weapon first.
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As with The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, this film takes viewers to Europe and features some of the world’s most famous tourist attractions in places such as Venice, Florence and Istanbul, including Palazzo Vecchio, Hagia Sophia and the Basilica Cistern. Audience members who have visited those places will love it.
And while Langdon doesn’t seem to solve as many puzzles in Inferno, it has enough adventure to keep most people entertained.
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