Inferno (2016) – Film Review

Director: Ron Howard
Cast: Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Irrfan Khan
Certificate: 12A

by Anel Blazevic

Inferno‘s superiority to two turkey predecessors shouldn’t necessarily propel you to your nearest Odeon at lightning speed – especially as said predecessors were of the clucking awful variety – but at least here is a decent puzzle solver action movie, mainly down to cutting back on some of the Dan Brown exposition that made the earlier films so tiresome. Although admittedly, it’s hardly short on verbose scenes.

This time we find Tom Hanks’s Langdon in a Florence hospital. He’s sporting a nasty head wound but has no memory of how he got it. Oh – and an assassin has just burst into his hospital ward and tried to kill him.

So begins a frenetic story, with Hanks slotting the missing jigsaw pieces together in-between Bourne-esque predicaments. A virus that will annihilate half the world’s population gets thrown into the mix.

“It borders on the ridiculous”

Intrigue comes from the shifting alliances as the film sorts good from bad and vice-versa. Hanks just about gets away with the action stuff, mainly through never pretending to be an action hero at all.

It’s nicely shot and the travelogue is a visual feast, going from Italy to Istanbul to Venice. At times it borders on the ridiculous, with some of the cryptic problem solving links tenuous at best. Buy hey, this is Dan Brown, remember?

It’s still full of flaws and hokum, but this piece of cinematic fluff should at least keep your interest to the end.
6/10