It's pretty much what you'd expect. Which is not a good thing for a mystery-thriller.
The third Robert Langdon film (adapted from the fourth Robert Langdon book) gracefully steers us away from the Church and toward, well, something else. Not as graceful in transition is the new focal point, and so the film wavers unsure in the midst of humanistic concern, vague religious and artistic references, and an attempt at being the next great action flick. But summer is long over.
Let's not make the mistake of expecting more from this film than we should. It's a Dan Brown novel after all, replete with bizarre leaps in logic, lengthy soliloquies of encyclopedic knowledge, secret societies and ulterior motives, and melodramatic, apocalyptic themes. Let's not judge the film, then, too harshly on those things. Rather, let's focus on director Ron Howard, cinematographer Salvatore Totino, and writer David Koepp. With a crew this excellent (with the arguable exception of Howard), I expected more, and not just because these three guys also worked on the other Langdon films (Koepp only worked on Angels & Demons, but his considerable work elsewhere influences my opinion of him). So I wonder why the change in their aesthetic style. Sure, The Da Vinci Code was almost painfully true to the book, while its sequel took more than its fair share of liberties. But both those films had a grandiose style, a picturesque quality that matched their awareness of place and theme.
Inferno, on the other hand, is gritty and shaky, presented to us mostly through handheld camera and dizzying cuts between points of view. Sure, the shots of Florence and Venice are beautiful, but they are brief and interrupted by cheap chase scenes down crowded streets. The climax, which could easily have been the most beautiful and haunting part of the film, became a confused mess as we saw our lead characters fighting in chest-deep scarlet water; the editing was so bad I could scarcely understand what I was seeing, and all I wanted was for it to be over. Probably not the filmmakers' intended effect. I should say, however, that the best part of the film for me was early on, when Langdon repeatedly experiences vivid visions of hell on earth; seeing the words of Dante incarnate on screen in such imaginative and visceral ways was something that should have belonged in a better movie.
I wouldn't quite argue that this one is worse than Angels & Demons, but Koepp's screenplay seems pretty forced most of the time. It's almost as though Howard wanted the film to be more important or significant than it is, so he and Koepp tossed in as many references to Dante's Divine Comedy as they possibly could, thinking that they would impress audiences with their arcane knowledge. To be fair, a lot of the old white people in the theater with me did seem impressed with the same. Perhaps Howard knows his target audience a little too well.
Even so, the film's frantic pace, frenzied editing, and chaotic script leave much to be desired, perhaps most of all near the end, when the film completely derails its emotional impact by introducing one of Langdon's colleague as an old flame and potential love interest. Maybe if the writer had stuck to the source material, the film wouldn't have fizzled so badly at its most intense part. Most of the film gives us so little understanding of what's happening that we have no one to root for, no reason to get ourselves involved; that romantic revelation feels so obnoxiously force-fed that we don't want to root for anyone.
Of course the movie is silly. It's preposterous. And that's totally fine. Its sin, however, is that it refuses to have any fun with itself. That's how Die Hard works. With an action-mystery-thriller like this, you've got to either pack it airtight full of smarts, or let the action usher in the fun. Inferno commits the sin of doing neither, and so it sinks into one of its own circles of hell.
IMDb: Inferno
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