Inferno (2016)
Directed by Ron Howard
After waking up in a hospital with amnesia, professor Robert Langdon and a doctor must race against time to foil a deadly global plot.
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Next thing we know, Zobrist races to the top of a bell tower in Florence, Italy, and, rather than be arrested by a World Health Organization agent named Bouchard (Omar Sy), hurls himself to his death in an homage to Alfred Hitchcock's classic "Vertigo."
Howard kicks things off, however, with a more incongruous “Vertigo” reference — one of a couple, in fact — as crazed billionaire geneticist Bertrand Zobist (Ben Foster) falls to his death from the top of a bell tower in Florence.
The audience already knows that our crazed billionaire, Bertrand Zobrist (Foster), sort of a Richard Branson/Bill Gates love child, has been preaching about the imminent disasters caused by global overpopulation, and that he’s killed himself in a nod to Vertigo, rather than give up information to Sy.
In a perfect world, they should transition nicely to the big screen as breezy popcorn movies akin to the National Treasure flicks but the execution just never seems to be there.
You wish it would combine with the “National Treasure” movies so Nic Cage could appear and at least liven things up a bit.
It’s honestly ridiculous, a Nicolas Cage “National Treasure” puzzle-thriller with a degree in art history.
For my money, 2004’s “National Treasure” remains the only good Robert Langdon adaptation to date, if only in spirit.
Like those ridiculous National Treasure flicks featuring Nicolas Cage as a nerdy Indiana Jones, the three films showcasing Hanks as Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon position themselves as brainy action yarns, with the hero pausing during lengthy chases to rattle off historical tidbits regarding Leonardo Da Vinci (2006's The Da Vinci Code) or the Catholic Church (2009's Angels & Demons) or Dante Alighieri (this entry).
Ron Howard’s Inferno is a less-interesting National Treasure that continues a dull parade of 2016 dad-thrillers (The Accountant/Jack Reacher: Never Go Back) that waste bolstered casts (Tom Hanks/Felicity Jones) and/or previous successes.
There is some inspiration in the climax, which features an onscreen orchestra performing the same Hans Zimmer score we’re hearing, in a possible nod to The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).
He suffers debilitating Dante-esque visions of suffering, disease and violence, including a huge wall of spurting blood no doubt inspired by Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining."
Also, there’s thousands of gallons of blood exploding out of shattered windows in a special effect that may beat, if only in volumetric terms, the bloody elevator shot in The Shining.
Here we see cities overrun by zombies with backward-facing heads, limbs from half-buried cadavers branded with rococo lettering and flash floods of blood exploding through office buildings like the elevators in “The Shining” in overdrive.
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This end-of-the-world tease recalls Robert Altman’s end-of-culture alarum in his 1992 film The Player, which has now been remastered as a Criterion Blu-Ray.
You have to give Koepp credit for even attempting to wrestle Brown’s tome into some sort of respectability; he fails, but rarely abjectly (there’s an exception in the brief clip in which Zobrist enthuses about the Black Death bringing about the Renaissance—which seems a crude attempt to recall Orson Welles’ famous speech about Switzerland and Italy from “The Third Man”).
Howard, for his part, appears to have shot proceedings through a slightly yellowed 1990s filter: The tone and aesthetic here often recall that era’s odd spate of gaudily portentous, pseudo-theological thrillers in the vein of “End of Days” and “Stigmata.”
You know that scene in Independence Day where Jeff Goldblum just makes a long string of word associations that eventually lead him to the answer?
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Perhaps the supporting cast member to leave the biggest imprint, though, is a relatively peripheral one: the instantly charming Ida Darvish (2007's " The Astronaut Farmer "), stealing her scenes with humor and grace as Palazzo Vecchio employee Marta Alvarez.
Waking up in a hospital room with super-migraines and selective amnesia, he goes “Three Days of the Condor” with a plucky nurse (Felicity Jones).