The latest Da Vinci Code movie achieves the difficult task of somehow being both a tedious chore and cartoonishly silly.
Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones are both great actors and Ron Howard can be a great director, but Inferno is terrible.
It follows Professor Robert Langdon as he comes to in a hospital suffering amnesia and hallucinations from a head injury. After a series of boring and badly edited visions, somebody is shooting at Langdon and he's taken away by a helpful nurse.
Before you know it, they're exploring massive art galleries in Florence and ancient religious buildings in Istanbul of which Langdon knows every hidden nook and cranny with a sort of superhuman memory.
He's embroiled in a plot to release a super disease that will cull half of the world's humans, in order to ultimately save everyone from fatal overpopulation, which is an interesting idea - bizarre mass-terrorism with the aim of actually saving the whole human race.
Despite that intriguing concept, the way this story plays out is really, really silly, and it's delivered with a po-faced seriousness.
The preposterousness is sometimes amusing, but Inferno doesn't have any of the pulpy excitement similar movies normally do - it's sort of like Indiana Jones meets Jason Bourne, made by someone who hates action and/or fun.
By the time if finally ends after more than two hours(!), it's become a truly wearisome slog that all ends with a generic, anti-climactic stop-the-bomb bit.
Unless you're falling in and out of sleep on a plane or half-watching it while cooking in another room, avoid this one like the plague.
One-and-a-half stars.
Inferno:: Director: Ron Howard:: Starring: Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Ben Foster, Omar Sy, Irrfan Khan, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Ana Ularu, Kata Sarbó:: Rating: M - Violence and offensive language:: Running Time: 121 minutes:: Release Date: October 13, 2016
Newshub.
