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"Inferno" Blazes Into Mediocrity Due to Plot Change

Professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) returns in the third film installment of Dan Brown’s bestselling book series. Professor Langdon wakes up in a Florentine hospital, having no memory of the past two days. He teams up with Dr. Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones) in a race across Europe to stop a sinister scheme to wipe out half the world’s population.

“Inferno” brings all of the thrill and intricacies that we’ve grown to expect from a story written by Brown. The characters are incredibly developed and motivated and the plot is well-woven.

Tom Hanks’ acting is sure to be one of the best qualities of any film that he stars in. That holds true for “Inferno.” Hanks slips easily back into his role as Langdon. Will this performance earn him any awards? No, but it is still a fantastic display of highly disciplined acting. Felicity Jones, soon to star in “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” also offers up a captivating performance in her role as Brooks.

The plot of “Inferno” is a complex, multi-arc story that captures the audience’s interest and holds it for the majority of the film. Like “The DaVinci Code” and “Angels and Demons,” “Inferno” presents Langdon and the audience with a complicated set of puzzles and riddles. The film is heavily rooted in realism, and most everything in the film was believable, with the exception of the presence of a heavily-armed SWAT type team run by the World Health Organization.

Every scene of “Inferno” was filled to the brim with either intense chases or some other tension-building mechanism. Every single scene. This led me to question whether there was such a thing as too much tension.

Ron Howard doesn’t seem to think so.

You have to hand it to him, as a director, Ron Howard is great at getting audiences to feel tension: “Apollo XIII,” anyone? Howard is a great director, but his direction of the Robert Langdon series has always felt off to me. It’s like ... I don’t know ... getting the creator of “Lost” to direct the seventh “Star Wars.”

“Inferno’s” many plot arcs came together very nicely at the end, but rather than tying off a neat metaphorical little bow, the director and producers tied the plot arcs together in what loosely resembles a five-year-old’s shoelaces. The production staff dropped the ball. Brown’s novel ended with a compelling twist that shocked its readers in its commentary on the human race. But the writers and director of the film instead opted to re-write the ending, leaving audiences with a marvelous story that ends in shameful mediocrity.

“Inferno” is a decent film that, with a few re-writes, some reshoots, and about three months more post-production and polish, could have been a great film. But “Inferno” instead seems doomed to join the rest of the Robert Langdon films in the world of ratings mediocrity.


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