Inferno is plot-hole ridden, ludicrous, preposterous nonsense — but is also occasionally good fun
IMAGINE being the curator of a hugely respected museum and opening Dan Brown’s latest Robert Langdon novel.
You skim through the plot hoping, praying,
that Tom Hanks and 300 crew don’t turn up some time in the future to film a scene which will inevitably mean you having to explain to visitors for years to come that:
“No, this mask is not responsible for four billion deaths” or:
“No, there isn’t a secret passage underneath that tomb.”
Well, this time round it is the turn of Florence,
with director Ron Howard and Tom’s third outing into Brown’s jumbled,
madcap — and phenomenally successful — series of books.
Inferno is obviously plot-hole ridden nonsense. For example,
a great friend of Langdon goes into hiding and is never mentioned or heard of again.
Swap Da Vinci for Dante and Audrey Tautou for Felicity Jones and you have exactly the same film.
A nutter is angry about global over­population so has created a virus to destroy half the Earth’s population.
Rather than walk into Westfield and just drop it on the floor in Primark,
he has insisted on whatever the opposite of a treasure hunt is,
via the world’s most beautiful cities with a generous 48-hour warning and a set of clues.
Langdon (Hanks), our hero, has not only lost his mullet but also his memory.
There are double crosses, breathless dashes across beautiful looking cities, astonishing clue reveals and a nail-biting end.
This is ludicrous, preposterous stuff — but is also occasionally good fun.
I just don’t see how this has been stretched into a third version of the same movie.
Annoyingly, the ending of the book has been “Hollywoodised” beyond recognition.
Everyone involved has done the bare minimum — in this case condensing a particularly bad season of 24 into 121 minutes.
YOU could literally halve American Honey’s 164-minute running time and absolutely nothing would change about the plot.
Despite this, it’s rather good.
Director Andrea Arnold’s indie was the darling of the Cannes Film Festival.
A disenchanted young woman joins a group of fellow lost souls travelling the US hoping to achieve some kind of eternal, opiate-filled utopia.
The plot is tenuously strung together by main character Star (Sasha Lane) having a romance with Shia LaBeouf,
There are never-ending scenes of the gang of youths talking about nothing or staring blankly ahead at the endless road.
Everyone in this movie ends as miserable and unmotivated as they began. But that’s life.
Not everyone has an unexpected event to turn things around for them.
At least their drudgery has a killer soundtrack behind it.
Their new corporate life is thrown into turmoil when Nate,
the lonely son of work-obsessed parents, requests a baby brother,
triggering a long journey for Junior, the deputy head stork.
There are some great moments, including a posse of wolves that deserve their own spinoff movie.
The original storyline is fun but there is a real feeling that characters are scripted specifically to become a meme or catchphrase,
dating a lot of the humour.
Kids will enjoy the frenetic pace of the film,
but grown-ups are left with a film depicting an even more over-populated Earth . . .
without the fun of making babies the old-fashioned way. And that sucks.
