Movie Review: Inferno (2016)

I have a bit of a soft spot for this franchise. I thoroughly enjoy the novels and I do enjoy the other movies. So let’s see if the newest one is any good.

Ladies and gentlemen… “Inferno”.

Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) finds himself waking up in a hospital in Florence, not remembering anything that happened in the last 48 hours. And soon he finds himself on the run with his nurse (Felicity Jones), trying to follow clues to stop a plague from being unleashed. And all of this is somehow related to “The Divine Comedy” (AKA “Dante’s Inferno”). And to be completely honest, I found the plot here pretty dull. Now, none of the previous movies had particularly amazing plots, but at least there was something that could be held on to. But this is just dull and not very interesting. Which is sad because there are some clever ideas in this that could make for a really interesting plot. However they are not used cleverly at all in here. It’s dull. And the twists in this movie are not that great. They’re there, and I didn’t exactly predict all of them… but they weren’t really that good.

The characters in this movie are for the most part pretty uninteresting. Robert Langodn is somewhat interesting, but that’s mainly becaue he’s played by Tom Hanks who does a good job with what he’s given. Felicity Jones in the movie gives a good performance even though her character for msot of the movie is kind of bland and uninteresting. Irrfan Khan plays a kind of shady dude in the movie and he’s probably the best thing in it. His character is actually a little interesting and even has a few fun lines. And Khan gives a solid performance. We also get Ben Foster as a rich dude that more or less pops up every now and then in the movie, and he was… okay. And saying that makes me kind of sad because Ben Foster is one of those actors who usually gives excellent performances that are also kind of over-the-top (in just the right way), but here he is rather dull. Here’s what I have to say about the cast: The actors are trying, and for the most part they give good performances… but the characters are not really that interesting.

The score for the movie was composed by Hans Zimmer and it was pretty good. While this isn’t one of his best scores, it was still good and it almost worked to make certain scenes more exciting… almost.

This movie was (just like the previous ones) directed by Ron Howard and he did an okay job. The biggest problem here is that the movie looks like it was made on a TV budget. The things that made me remember “Oh right, this is a theatrically released movie!” was the cast and the locations they featured in it. Speaking of which, the places featured in the movie… beautiful, an absolute treat for a culture nerd like me. But the camera work doesn’t look bad at all, but it also doesn’t have any real style to it.

This movie has been very well received. On Rotten Tomatoes it has a 19% positive rating. On Metacritic it has a score of 42/100. And on imdb.com it has a score of 6,2/10.

“Inferno” is a very dull movie in an otherwise okay franchise. It has a dull plot, dull characters, good performances, pretty good music, and okay directing. However, it is brought down quite a bit because of the plot being as dull as it is, with characters being really uninteresting, and because of the bland directing. Time for my final score. *Clears throat*. My final score for “Inferno” is a 5,55/10. So I’d say that you should skip it.

My review of “Inferno” is now completed.

This movie clearly didn’t know how to use it’s Ben Foster.