✯½

We’ve gotten this far ahead inside of a world where Robert Langdon is thought to be potential for an iconic film character and yet his previous two films are either laughably ridiculous with the turns of their mysteries or horrendously boring at their worst. Inferno, while not nearly as tedious the experience that The Da Vinci Code was, just goes down the way Angels & Demons had suffered in the sense that they twist far too much either it can get too ridiculous for their own good, stinting itself from retaining one’s interest. We’re three films into this series already and they forgot what is the key element to Robert Langdon that should have been present with The Da Vinci Code.

Once again, we have Harvard professor Robert Langdon as played by Tom Hanks within a European setting and now he’s on another quest to solve another mystery that involves an artifact. He’s paired together with Felicity Jones after he had awoken with amnesia one day although visions fill up his mind as they collect a link towards Dante’s Inferno. It’s already something that we have come to expect at this point in the adventures of Robert Langdon and quite frankly that’s only one of many factors that shows exactly what is wrong with Inferno. From The Da Vinci Code onward, the stories are only being repeated within different locations and they forget about the more important details.

What’s one of the most critical components to Inferno‘s failure is the fact that even though we are already three films into this series, we still have not learned nor been provided enough to care for Robert Langdon’s character arc. If Ron Howard ever wanted to turn him or Dan Brown’s work in general into an iconic character, he could at least have provided something more in regards to why he must be at the core of every mystery. In Inferno, once again it fails to let alone make Robert Lagndon some sort of an iconic detective trying to solve a bigger puzzle right at hand, and that’s really everything that will soon come to hit the viewer, leaving them inside of a disinterested state.

It is also much more irritating when one looks at the relationship between Tom Hanks and Felicity Jones, an actress whose talent is clearly not reflected by the many choices of films that she has starred within. The chemistry between the two of them is so nonexistent, but Ron Howard keeps moving around where they go. It never exactly helps when the material to which has been provided is nothing more than just tedious all throughout. Jones is clearly trying her best, but Tom Hanks is only phoning in just as he always has when he played Robert Langdon, though I’m not one to blame him because Langdon himself was always an uninteresting figure and Inferno just continues along with keeping him as bland as he always was through all the dullest moments provided as a result of Ron Howard’s direction.

What’s possibly the worst crime that Inferno commits is not the core of the mystery nor the disorienting action – it would be from the fact it just jumps around at random, often leading to ridiculous conclusions and twists that never amount to much significance or play to a hilarious effect. If the tedious nature of The Da Vinci Code or the asinine directions as taken in Angels & Demons could not be topped, what Inferno does is something even more laughable. It seems to be a problem with the writing in the cases of both ends of the spectrum whether it be Dan Brown’s original novel or David Koepp’s screenplay, but clearly a different direction was taken from the moment Akiva Goldsman has gone off when it came to the needless exposition he placed within The Da Vinci Code. But maybe that’s what the entirety of Inferno is, just needless exposition.

If these films were supposedly Ron Howard’s ideas of what would boost him to create something iconic, he seems to have been looking in the wrong places ever since The Da Vinci Code has come out. You can give credit to Angels & Demons for just taking turns only for the more ridiculous but with Inferno, it seems they only go down more by that route and even though we’re three films in, we barely even learned anything about Robert Langdon to even care about him. If they ever make another one of these movies, I wonder if they’ll ever present something interesting about Langdon to make me take interest in where the mysteries take him.

Watch the trailer right here.

All images via Sony Pictures.

Directed by Ron Howard
Screenplay by David Koepp, from the novel by Dan Brown
Produced by Brian Grazer, Ron Howard
Starring Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Ben Foster, Omar Sy
Release Year: 2016
Running Time: 121 minutes