Inferno is the third movie based on a Dan Brown novel, and arguably, possibly, I guess, the best: though that's not saying much, since they've all been talky bores more interested in the cleverness and pseudo-intellectualism of their overstuffed, nonsensical plots.
When we last saw Professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) in Angels & Demons he was … well. Hold on. He was … something about the Catholic Church and Ewan McGregor as a priest and, maybe, a terrorist? I think? I can't remember a single thing about the plot and I reviewed it for a minor metropolitan newspaper upon its release seven years ago. Angels & Demons was the sequel to the Da Vinci Code, a slightly more memorable feature in that, at least, it featured an albino, murderous Paul Bettany alongside Sir Ian McKellen serving as a font of exposition about the blood of Christ.
So anyway, that professor guy who gets into all the whacky adventures involving the Catholic Church and "symbology"—the "field" in which he is a "professor" at "Harvard"—is back! This time he wakes up in a hospital in Florence, Italy, with a nasty head wound and a murderous policewoman on his tail. She's after a Faraday Pointer that projects a map of Dante's Inferno on the wall, a device Langdon discovers in his coat pocket in the apartment of Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones). But the painting has been changed—the levels of hell have been rearranged and a radical environmentalist billionaire named Zobrist (Ben Foster) has added an inscription and a clue to it.
A clue that, naturally, Langdon must solve, while explaining tidbits about Medieval European history to the clueless audience in gushing rivers of expository dialogue and being chased around the globe by a paramilitary unit of the World Health Organization headed by one-time Langdon flame Elizabeth Sinskey (Sidse Babett Knudsen). The WHO is involved because Zobrist's Malthusian tendencies have inspired him to create a virus that will kill billions if Langdon is unable to stop its release.
There's something darkly amusing about the series' shift in villain, from radicals within the Catholic Church to radicals within the environmentalist movement. It's fitting: both are driven by faith that man is inherently wicked and that an apocalypse will one day result in a planet-emptying end times. The difference, of course, is that environmentalist terrorism is quite real while albino-led Catholic hit squads terrorizing descendants of Jesus Christ are, let's say, a bit more fanciful.
The best thing about Inferno—really, the thing that puts it head and shoulders above its predecessors, though that's not saying much—is the tremendously fun performance by Irrfan Khan, who plays the head of a shadowy security consulting firm hired by Zobrist to help ensure the plan goes off without a hitch. Wry, dry, and too cool to be seen to try, Khan's Harry Sims brings the only real levity to the film and seems somewhat detached from the nonsense surrounding him. I'm not saying Irrfan Khan should definitely win best supporting actor at the Oscars, but he should be on the shortlist for singlehandedly kinda-sorta saving this easily skipped picture.