Inferno (2016)

There's a moment somewhere in the middle of Inferno where I genuinely couldn't tell you what was happening or why, and the film didn't seem particularly bothered about helping me out. Not because it was being cleverly elliptical, mind you, but because it had mistaken confusion for mystery and spectacle for meaning. That's the whole problem with this one in a nutshell.

This is the third outing for Robert Langdon, and I've followed the series from the beginning. I gave The Da Vinci Code a fair crack and found things to enjoy in it, and Angels and Demons kept the momentum going reasonably well. But Inferno is where the wheels come properly off. What started as a series with a genuine sense of pulpy intrigue has run out of road, and rather than going out on a high, it sputters to a stop like a car that forgot to fill up before a long journey.

The premise isn't without promise. Langdon wakes up with amnesia, has no idea where he is or how he got there, and gradually pieces together that a billionaire with a god complex is planning to wipe out half the world's population with a engineered virus, all wrapped up in imagery and symbolism drawn from Dante's Inferno. On paper, that's got tension baked right in. The ethics of population control, the horror of bioterrorism, Dante's vision of hell as a kind of twisted mirror to the modern world. Any one of those threads could've been gripping. Instead, the film treats them all as window dressing.

Tom Hanks is still game, I'll give him that. He's a professional and it shows. But even he can only do so much with dialogue that lands like a thud and a character who seems to exist purely to jog between famous landmarks and recite exposition. Felicity Jones, who I know can do compelling work, is almost entirely wasted here. The chemistry between them is nonexistent, and the film doesn't seem to notice or care.

Florence, Venice and Istanbul all look gorgeous, and I won't pretend otherwise. But gorgeous locations aren't a substitute for a story that earns its tension. The film lurches from set piece to set piece, stitched together with frantic editing and CGI-heavy hallucination sequences that feel less like inventive filmmaking and more like watching someone else play a video game. It's polished in the way that a showroom car is polished: gleaming on the surface, with nothing under the bonnet.

The villain's motivation is cartoonishly underwritten, delivered without a shred of genuine menace. When the grand reveal about the virus and its so-called solution finally arrives, it lands with almost no emotional or ethical weight whatsoever. These are questions that could've had you squirming in your seat, genuinely unsettled. Instead, I felt nothing. The film had already spent so much energy rushing me from one clue to the next that it forgot to make me care about the destination.

The recycled formula is a big part of the problem. Cryptic clues. European landmarks. A shadowy organisation operating in the background. We've been here twice already, and this time there's no intellectual spark to justify another spin of the wheel. The pacing is all over the place, the structure feels rushed, and by the time the climax arrives I was ready for the credits before the film knew it was finished.

Two stars. It's not offensive in the way that some blockbusters are, not aggressively terrible or insulting to your intelligence in a memorable way. It's worse than that, really. It's just dull. Forgettable from the moment the screen goes dark. Langdon deserved a proper send-off, and quite frankly, so did we.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 2016  | Watched: 2025-10-04

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