You have to admire any film that aims to make musty, old archives sexy, or one that tries to remind today’s coders and comp-sci majors that art and literature are still a thing.
It’s been a decade since a longish-haired Tom Hanks first played symbologist Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code, the second of author Dan Brown’s wildly popular art history/secret society thrillers, but the first to make it to the big screen. The film angered the Catholic church by suggesting that Jesus fathered children, and it set the plight of Albino people back decades. It was a hit nonetheless, raking in some $758 million worldwide.
The 2009 sequel, Angels and Demons, ticked off the church once again (maybe Ewan McGregor was too cute for the cassock?), and made almost $300 million less than the first film when the incense cleared.
So let’s take a moment to applaud director Ron Howard for braving a third go-round and bringing Brown’s latest — Inferno — to the big screen.
As in Angels and Demons there is a fundamental clash between art and science at the film’s core. This time the clock is ticking on our hero who must stop a madman from releasing a plague intended to wipe out much of the world’s population; on the arty side, the first clue lies within a representation of Dante’s Inferno.
But Dr. Langdon’s memory is a little fuzzy, a hell of sorts for a stuffy academic. Langdon wakes up after some potent hallucinations in an Italian hospital with a head injury and no memory, only a precious clue in his pocket for which people are willing to kill, or in one memorable intro scene, take swan-dives off of clocktowers. It’s up to Langdon to follow the clues and try to stay several steps ahead of the people who want him dead. Luckily there’s doctor Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones), who possesses both a killer IQ and a trusty moped, keen to help Langdon solve the mystery of how he got there.
The journey takes the duo, ever frantically, through the streets of Florence, Venice and Istanbul. Drone chases through the Boboli Gardens, underground sprints in the belly of St. Mark’s Basilica, cisterns under the Hagia Sofia. It’s a credit to cinematographer Salvatore Totino (Everest) that we wish the principals would slow down already — catastrophic virus be damned — so we could stop and take a look at those breathtaking historic locales they’re racing past.
The international cast of characters includes Indian star Irrfan Khan (excellent) as Provost of a secret global consortium; French actor Omar Sy is World Health Association bad-guy Christoph Bouchard; plus Danish actress Sidse Babett Knudsen (seen earlier this year alongside Hanks in A Hologram For The King); and American Ben Foster (Hell or High Water) as the misguided bioengineer Bertrand Zobrist, who believes a new Renaissance is just around the corner, if only we could just cull the herd a little.
Dan Brown knows that no one can resist a good puzzle, to say nothing of secret handshakes and hidden doors; no one said that subtle prose was his forte. So in the hands of screenwriter David Koepp there is much over-narration, which Hanks must muddle through while wincing and grimacing due of his character’s head injury. Howard tries to compensate for this with those pretty travel snippets, and blood-soaked, Botticelli-inspired visions, visuals that keep the film from feeling like the 10th circle of hell.
Inferno screens at Fifth Avenue, Scotiabank, Dunbar and Marine Gateway.
