Inferno (2016)
(Video on Demand, February 2016) With Inferno, Tom Hanks is back for a third largely indifferent time as Robert Langdon, one of his career’s most undistinguished roles. One can’t fault Hank for teaming up with Ron Howard in adapting one of the most high-profile thriller series of the century so far … but the problem with Langdon is that he’s a character fully fleshed out by Hanks alone. There’s little on the page (either the book or the script) to make Langdon anything more than a fountain of information and a mannequin running through a convoluted plot. In the absence of such niceties, we’re left to rely on Tom Hanks, all-around American good guy, to give life to the series. To their credit, the filmmakers behind Inferno wisely dispensed with the most infuriating element of the novel’s conclusion, although they didn’t soften the moronic overpopulation rationale. The plot is ludicrous and the historical trivia is generally unremarkable, but the film does its best to wring a few honest moments of suspense from the result. I do believe that the film is an improvement over the borderline-unlikable book, but that’s not much of a baseline to begin with. (Inferno is the novel that finally made me give up on Dan Brown after being a bit of a contrarian cheerleader for him in post-The Da Vinci Code times.) You can argue that the story is more interesting than the previous two Langdon movies, but the freshness of the symbologist-as-hero premise has faded almost entirely. The result is average without dipping into mediocrity, which would have been a real danger at this point in the series. This being said, this is no call for a sequel. Let Hanks do something else.
