Inferno

Dir: Ron Howard

2016

*

The Da Vinci Code made good money, of course it did, it was based on a bestselling novel. Angels & Demons was panned by everyone, it did well because people wanted to know if the story would be as good/better/as controversial as the first, it wasn't but it still made good money. The whole bad movie/profitable movie discussion continues, because some people still don't understand that good or bad, people still have to pay to see it. It has been seven years since the previous Robert Langdon movie and time can be a great healer, those that hated Angels & Demons in 2009 might now be prepared to give the franchise another go, hoping that valuable lessons had been learned. Inferno is actually the fourth Robert Langdon adventure, it was published in 2013 and followed The Lost Symbol which came out just after Angels & Demons in 2009. The Da Vinci Code was actually the second book published, Angels & Demons came before but was adapted for the screen as a follow up. The same team did try and develop The Lost Symbol as the follow up to Angels & Demons but the script was never agreed and they scrapped it and made Inferno instead. You could argue that this mixes the story up enough for people who have already read the books but you could also suggest that they've messed up the original stories to the point they are running out of clever ideas. So you would hope that Inferno was something of a new beginning for them, a change of pace and style maybe, but no, it's just as awful as the previous films, if not worse. It seems time hasn't cured anything and indeed most people hadn't recovered from Angels & Demons and Inferno did much worse than predicted in the cinema. I didn't think much of the whole memory loss theme from the get go. It's been done before and all of the story's twists were obvious way before they were revealed. On paper the rest of the story is strong, I liked all the bits about Dante's Inferno, his death mask and Sandro Botticelli's Map of Hell, it was just the endless car chases, shoot-outs and constant jumping out of windows that I hated - again. It was also amazing what Robert Langdon didn't know this time round. He knows all sorts of secrets, the secret passage ways hidden in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio for instance, but he doesn't know about the Basilica Cistern underneath Istanbul's Hagia Sophia, even though it's one of the world’s most famous tourist attractions? It's in From Russia With Love for goodness sake! This is the guy were lead to believe found The Holy Grail! Ron Howard is a better director than this, I didn't hate the fantasy scenes where Botticelli's Map of Hell came to life through Langdon's state of amnesia but it didn't really fit well among the silly action. It also didn't make sense that we could see it as the viewer, especially as we didn't see other things through Langdon's point of view. Hitchcock wrote the book on this kind of direction back in the 60s and dismissed the style as being patronizing and disrespectful towards the viewer. It's a technical matter but by this point I'm not sure that even the most serious of cinephile would be giving the film their full attention because there is little that is captivating and even vaguely interesting about it. I have said in the past that The Da Vinci Code was like a poor man's Indiana Jones, but Inferno is even poorer. When you break the films down and compare them they are all pretty much as bad as each other, however, Inferno is worse because it doesn't learn from any of the mistakes of the first two, even though critics and audiences have been pretty vocal about them. It's sad when talented film makers, who I have huge respect for, keep making terrible decisions.