Ron Howard’s Inferno opens with a man waking in a Florence hospital with no memory of the last few days. He is Harvard professor Robert Langdon, played by Tom Hanks, and the film never really recovers from that opening. The amnesia is a handy device — it lets Langdon and the audience learn the plot at the same speed — but it also means the movie spends its first act explaining itself, and its second act explaining the first.
Inferno premiered in Florence on October 8, 2016, and reached the United States on October 28, ten years after The Da Vinci Code. It is the third and final film in the Robert Langdon series, and it is the weakest.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Sienna Brooks and the Map of Hell
The doctor who attends Langdon is Sienna Brooks, played by Felicity Jones. She tells him his amnesia comes from a bullet wound to the head, and when an orderly announces that the police have arrived to question him, the officer turns out to be Vayentha (Ana Ularu), an assassin who shoots the orderly in the hallway. Brooks gets Langdon out of the hospital and takes him to her apartment.
There, among his belongings, the two find a Faraday pointer — a miniature image projector holding a modified version of Sandro Botticelli’s Map of Hell, itself based on Dante’s Inferno. The pointer is the first clue in a trail left by Bertrand Zobrist, played by Ben Foster: a billionaire transhumanist scientist who believed rigorous measures were needed to cut the Earth’s growing population, and who killed himself three days earlier after armed government agents chased him.
Langdon and Brooks work out that Zobrist, obsessed with Dante, built a biological superweapon he called “Inferno.” Its potential: annihilating half the world’s population. That is the engine of the film, and it is a good one. The trouble is everything bolted to it.
Vayentha, The Consortium, and Two Sets of Pursuers
Inferno runs on a double chase. Vayentha tracks Langdon and Brooks, and so do government agents led by Elizabeth Sinskey (Sidse Babett Knudsen), a former lover of Langdon’s. Sinskey runs the World Health Organization in this film. When the agents raid Brooks’s apartment, the pair flee again.
Vayentha answers to Harry Sims, played by Irrfan Khan — the CEO of a private security company called The Consortium. Sims is working for Zobrist, and once Langdon becomes a liability, Sims orders Vayentha to kill him. Omar Sy plays Christophe Bouchard, head of the SRS team at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Paul Ritter appears as Arbogast, Sims’s right-hand man.
That is a lot of machinery, and the film treats it as machinery. Khan is the only performer who seems to be having any fun, and he gets the least screen time of anyone in the principal cast.
A Table of What Inferno Inherits
| Film | Year | Director | Langdon’s co-lead | Box office |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Da Vinci Code | 2006 | Ron Howard | — | — |
| Angels & Demons | 2009 | Ron Howard | — | — |
| Inferno | 2016 | Ron Howard | Felicity Jones as Dr. Sienna Brooks | $220 million |
The source material does not give box office figures for the first two films, and this review will not supply them. What the table does show is the shape of the problem: Inferno is the third entry in a series that has never changed directors, never changed its star, and never found a reason to exist beyond the next puzzle.
The Botticelli Pointer and the Dante Problem
Dante is the film’s best idea and its most wasted one. Zobrist’s obsession with the Inferno gives the movie its images — the Map of Hell, the hellish visions that plague Langdon, the plague imagery that the title promises. Howard and writer David Koepp use Dante as set decoration. The poem is a tour of sin and punishment; the film is a tour of Italian rooms.
Langdon’s knowledge of Dante’s work and history, and of hidden passages, is what keeps him alive. That is the promise of the character, and Inferno delivers it in the least interesting way possible: Langdon looks at a thing, remembers a thing, and says the thing out loud. There is no pleasure in watching a man know something. There is pleasure in watching a man be wrong, and Inferno almost never lets him be wrong.
The film runs 122 minutes. It is billed as mystery, thriller and action, and it leans hardest on the last of those. The action is competent and weightless. The mystery is solved by the audience well before Langdon solves it. The thriller elements — the chases, the raids, the double-crosses — are staged with the flat professionalism of a director who has done this twice before and knows exactly how little it costs him.
A Series That Ran Out of Ideas
The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons had the advantage of novelty. Inferno has the disadvantage of being the third film to use the same three moves: a conspiracy, a chase across European cities, and a reveal that the villain was right about something. Zobrist’s argument — that the Earth cannot carry its population — is the most interesting thing in the movie, and the film is terrified of it. It makes him a suicide, a fanatic and a dead man before the first act ends, so that no one has to argue with him.
Filming began on April 27, 2015, in Venice, and wrapped on July 21 of that year in Budapest. Florence was among its filming locations, and the film premiered there. The film was loosely based on Dan Brown’s 2013 novel. “Loosely” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence, and so is “based.”
Hanks is fine. He has been fine in all three of these. Jones is given a character with a secret and plays the secret rather than the character. Foster’s turn as Zobrist is brief and ominous. Knudsen is asked to be steely, and is steely.
What Inferno Gets Right
The Faraday pointer is a genuinely good prop. A miniature image projector hidden among a man’s belongings, holding a modified Botticelli, is a better clue than anything in the previous two films, because it is small, specific and strange. The film knows this, and it lingers on the Map of Hell the way it lingers on nothing else.
The premise is also sturdier than it sounds. A weapon designed to kill half the world’s population is not a puzzle box, it is a countdown, and a countdown is a better engine for a thriller than a riddle. Inferno has the right machine. It just never drives it anywhere the audience has not already been.
The film received negative reviews from critics and grossed $220 million against a $75 million production budget. Whether that counts as a win depends on how you read the arithmetic, and the film’s backers have not said. What is clear is that the audience showed up in numbers, and the series ends here anyway. Inferno is the final film in the Robert Langdon series, and it earns that status by being the one with the least to say.
The Number That Fits
Inferno is a competent film that mistakes competence for suspense. It has a star who knows the role, a director who knows the genre, a writer who knows the structure, and a premise that could carry a better movie. What it does not have is a single scene that surprises you, a single performance that unsettles you, or a single argument it is willing to have.
The published critical score is 4.2 out of 10, and that is the right number. Inferno is not a disaster. It is a film that was made because the first two made money, and it plays like it. The tagline promises “His greatest challenge. Humanity’s last hope.” The greatest challenge turns out to be remembering the plot, and humanity’s last hope turns out to be a projector.
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