INFERNO (2016) MOVIE NEWS & REVIEW

inferno (2016) movie

Genre              |   Action Thriller

Classification   |   M

Running time   |   121 minutes

Released         |  13 October 2016

cast

Tom Hanks ... Robert Langdon
Felicity Jones ... Sienna Brooks
Omar Sy ... Christoph Bouchard
Irrfan Khan ... Harry Sims
Ben Foster ... Bertrand Zobrist

director

Ron Howard

writer

​Dan Brown ... (based in part on the novel by)
 
David Koepp ... (screenplay by)

cinematographer

​Salvatore Totino

music

Hans Zimmer

film editor

​Tom Elkins ... (edited by)
Daniel P. Hanley ... (as Dan Hanley) (edited by)

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box office result

Worldwide               $​220,021,259  

Australia                 $​​4,030,884

North America        $​​34,343,574

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the best dialogue

Robert Langdon: The greatest sins in human history have been committed in the name of love.

Bertrand Zobrist: There have been five... major... extinctions... in the Earth's history... and unless we take bold, immediate action... the sixth extinction... will be our own.

Harry Sims: At my behest. When things had appeared to go tits up, I tried to sweep it all away quickly.
Robert Langdon: By killing me?
Harry Sims: Oh, I apologize unreservedly, Mr. Langdon.

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INFERNO (2016) MOVIE IMAGES

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Posters

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INFERNO (2016) STORY SYNOPSIS

​Famous symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) follows a trail of clues tied to Dante, the great medieval poet. When Langdon wakes up in an Italian hospital with amnesia, he teams up with Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones), a doctor he hopes will help him recover his memories. Together, they race across Europe and against the clock to stop a madman (Ben Foster) from unleashing a virus that could wipe out half of the world's population.

INFERNO (2016) MOVIE REVIEW

Reviewed by Mark Geraghty   |   Review date 12 October 2016
Pop ​Movee Rating ⭐⭐½

Ron Howard’s feature film adaptation of Dan Brown’s novel INFERNO is, for the most part, solid entertainment, but Tom Hanks still feels like the wrong man for the central character of Robert Langdon. After three feature films, viewers might expect the leading man of the franchise to be comfortable in his character’s skin, but, yet again, the biggest letdown of this adaptation of Brown’s 2013 novel is everybody’s favourite ‘Everyman’, Tom Hanks.

Even more jarring for Hank’s Inferno character is the comparison regular moviegoers can draw between draw to his last film, having just seen him as real-life hero Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger in the Clint Eastwood movie SULLY. The genuine feats of heroism performed, culminating in the landing of a stricken Airbus A320 on New York’s Hudson River, in SULLY bring into sharp contrast Hanks’s leaden performance in the convoluted, contrived plot of Brown’s story; albeit sharply condensed by veteran screenwriter David Koepp.

For the better part of the film, Howard manages to mask Hank’s inertia with a series of set-pieces that rely on co-stars Felicity Jones (as Dr. Sienna Brooks), Omar Sy (as WHO Agent Christoph Bruder) and Sidse Knudsen (as Dr. Elizabeth Sinskey) to deliver the physical performances to make the film feel as though it has the right amount of action.

The film opens with Billionaire Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) throwing himself off the main tower in Florence after being enthusiastically pursued and surrounded by Omar Sy and his team of  globe-trotting World Health Organisation Agents. It's not quite the opening viewers would have been expecting given the prominence Foster’s character had in the film’s trailers. (Be assured, there’s enough flashbacks throughout the story to satisfactorily round out how his character came to be in such a precarious position.)

The action switches to Hank's, who is in an equally precarious position, waking to find himself in hospital with a gunshot graze to the head, no memory of how he got there and an extremely irritable Carabinieri, who seems hell-bent on unloading her firearm in Langdon’s general direction. It’s only for the quick thinking of Felicity Jones’s know-it-all Doctor Sienna Brooks that prevents Hanks’s Langdon sustain a mortal injury. Wasting no time, Langdon and Dr. Books start to piece together the pieces of Langdon’s previous 48 hours and how he came to be in possession of a vital piece evidence that will help to prevent a global plague!

David Koepp’s script and Ron Howard’s direction certainly pares back Brown’s novel to the most basic plot points. Brown’s novels are written not unlike a screenplay, with chapters standing in for set-pieces. Unlike the novel, INFERNO has little room for side bites that help to context the historical significance of the what has just been revealed. After a while the references to Dante’s Inferno become an infrequent touch-point to remind the audience that the movie is, after all, based on a Dan Brown novel!

The latter third of the film feels completely disconnected from prior events, as it becomes a straight-out action movie where the ultimate aim is for the lead players to act out a version of “Beat the Bomb”! In amongst all of this, Hanks fails to provide any sense of heroism as he lurches from one scene to the next. It falls to Irrfan Khan to bring some much-needed machismo to proceedings and Sidse Knudsen to fill in the action blanks when the film reaches its climax in Istanbul; a rather ham-fisted effort to highlight to audiences the challenges that confront both the East and the West in dealing with extremist terrorist activity.

INFERNO’s attempt to play as an intellectualised JAMES BOND falls far short of the mark and is a definite low-point for the Robert Langdon franchise, primarily due to Hanks being unable to do his share of the heavy-lifting when it comes to delivering the essential ingredient for this type of film: ACTION!

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