Dan Brown‘s wildly successful fiction has always seemed something of a devil’s bargain to me. Sure, his runaway thrillers promise fun alongside a sort of remedial education in the classics — but it’s not a particularly sound education, and the whole package comes spoon-fed in box-hack English that’s ten parsecs from cultured and then some. On the culture meter, it’s one tick forward, two ticks back.
That being the case, film ought to be the perfect medium for these Renaissance romps. What better way to strip these stories of Brown’s famously clumsy prose while at the same time sexing up centuries-old art for a yawn-prone audience on a sugar drip?
And it’s worked, to a degree: The Da Vinci Code was fun, all somber music and slow reveals and Tom Hanks puzzling over ancient secrets (and holy smokes, it’s been ten years?). Angels and Demons (book one but movie two) strayed a bit off the good path, but still offered at least the traditional Dan Brown bargain (Vatican, religious stuff, comely brunettes with accents, conspiracies, Hanks). Director Ron Howard skipped over the third book, The Lost Symbol (apparently it was optioned but never made, being eerily similar in story terms to that pinnacle of culture, Nicolas Cage‘s National Treasure), so we’ve arrived now with the third film being the fourth book: Brown’s latest, Inferno.
I promise that this timeline is the most complex puzzle you’ll need to keep track of here, and that includes if you see this movie. There’s not much to this one.
While previous installments all riffed on the same central conceit — old mysteries hidden in plain sight — this one takes a new and largely unsuccessful tack: swaddling a workaday bioterrorism plot in just enough Dante to fill a teaser trailer. Boil off the nonsense, and the paintings and sculptures and coded words are window dressing, an afterthought, here merely to justify Prof. Langdon’s involvement. Instead of the usual gossamer thread of mystery winding through distant history, what we have here is a manufactured crisis that’s deliberately obscured by amnesia and armchair art history, and never seems all that believable in the first place.
Inferno does hew close to formula elsewhere. Tom Hanks stars, Ron Howard directs, two comely brunettes with accents vie for Langdon’s erudite appeal, and we get a fast-paced, high-contrast, vivid-filtered tour of Italian galleries shot avec urgence. Guns are toted, curators whisk Langdon through back-passages to hidden treasures, pseudo-knowledge is dispensed, and pseudo-crises are averted. It’s all very blockbuster-grade, and Hanks does his best with the material. Irrfan Khan and Omar Sy are solid too (their characters less so) and Felicity Jones is fine. It’s also a very pretty film, though surprisingly light on locations.
But it’s also impossibly silly. The World Health Organization has assault rifles and fancy jets; a high-end security firm is based, Bond-villain style, in the high-tech belly of a roving cargo ship; Langdon has frequent “visions” of calamity to break up the otherwise humdrum first act.
It’s a shame Howard didn’t make more of the ample historical material he had to play with. For instance, the Black Death is discussed probably a dozen times, and really cried out for some Zimmer-scored montage reenactments. Alas, not to be. At least Langdon fires off some gee-whiz tidbits to make the audience feel smart, including my own personal cocktail-party favorite, the etymology of “quarantine.” Great, now I’ve got nothing. Thanks a lot.
In the end, Inferno is all about Langdon: A nail made for a hammer, a largely superfluous riddle built entirely for him to solve. Despite Howard’s best efforts with undoubtedly punishing source material, it’s just not as good as the rest.
Haus Verdict: Langdon is back, but the Renaissance finery is window dressing and the real plague is sequel-itis.
Inferno opens Friday October 28.
Never miss a review — sign up for email updates to the right, or like The Parsing Haus on Facebook!