Dan Brown × Ron Howard × Tom Hanks = Squareness Cubed! Hey, when I started this review, I didn’t realize it was going to be so mathematical!
Yes, Inferno is yet another roller-coaster of thrills from the Dan Man—just, you know, a very flat roller-coaster. That rowdy crowd over at Rotten Tomatoes dump all over Dan/Ron/Tom’s parade, averring that “Senselessly frantic and altogether shallow, Inferno sends the Robert Langdon trilogy spiraling to a convoluted new low”—“Robert Langdon” being Tom’s character in The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, and now Inferno.
Well, I dumped all over The Da Vinci Code when it first came out, ten long years ago, and bailed on A&D entirely, but I kind of liked the first third of Inferno.1 I won’t bore you with details, but poor Tom/Bob wakes up sans memory but avec Dr. Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones2), which to me does not sound like a bad trade at all.
As you might guess, things immediately start going sideways, in approved thriller fashion. A large number of bad asses converge on Tom’s hospital room, the tightest of which belongs to “Vayentha”, played by Romanian actress Ana Ularu, utterly adorable, and seriously spankable, in a skin-tight Carabinieri3 uniform.
Austere, ruthless, and totally cool, Vayentha looks to be Tom’s Guardian Angel/Ultimate Assassin, much in the fashion of Red Grant (Robert Shaw) in the James Bond classic, From Russia, With Love. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen.4 Instead, Tom and Felicity escape from all the bad guys, with little assistance and/or mayhem from Vayentha, and discover a coded map of Dante’s Inferno, originally drawn by Florentine artist Sandro Botticelli, which is where they’re at (Florence, I mean). Naturally, they have to race off to some glorious old churches, both in Florence and Venice, much in the fashion of Tom’s earlier escapades in The Da Vinci Code, though with a bit less of the “Omigod! The tomb of St. Sebastien the Martyr was transferred from the Sanctuary of the Compassionate Heart to the Sanctuary of the Sacred Heart in 1637!” running around that characterized so much of Da Vinci. But then, Inferno, much like Da Vinci, goes sideways again, bad sideways, this time, with a massive “reveal” that gives away the whole plot! No more mystery, just a lot of good guys and bad guys chasing each other!
As it turns out, we have too many good guys and too many bad guys, who pummel one another without much purpose or passion, particularly since Tubby Tom is too fat-assed to join in any of the pummeling. Worst of all, Vayentha/Ana gets killed early on, without ever killing anyone herself! What’s the point of having a killer babe if she never kills anyone? Anyway, getting back to the plot, suffice to say that the world does not blow up. Along the way, Tom/Bob runs into his long-lost sweetheart, Elizabeth Sinskey (Sidse Babett Knudsen), with whom he never got it on—you know, careers and all—and a remarkable amount of screen time is given to watching this plump, yet wrinkled, and highly unphotogenic pair sigh over their love that never was. Well, not to be rude, but who cares? I’m still missin’ Ana Ularu’s tight little ass.
Afterwords
Tom and Liz/Sidse imagine themselves as the reincarnation of Dante and his beloved, Beatrice Portinari, glossing (heavily) over the fact that, though Dante’s love for Beatrice was, as he told it, the determining factor in his life, it’s quite likely that they never had a conversation and certainly enjoyed no physical contact at all. Whether Beatrice ever even knew that Dante was in love with her is pretty much up in the air. According to Dante, he first saw Beatrice when she was eight and he was nine, and fell in love with her immediately.5 As well-born Florentines, they were destined to arranged marriages (not to each other). Beatrice died when she was twenty four. In La Vita Nuova (The New Life), Dante told how he wrote a few poems about her immediately after her death and then stopped, vowing not to write more until he could write of her “as no man ever wrote of woman before, as she doth well know,” a vow that ultimately culminated in The Divine Comedy.
- Looking back at my earlier review, I discover that I said the exact same thing about The Da Vinci Code. ↩︎
- I found Felicity way cuter than Audrey Tautou, Tom’s earlier non-squeeze in The Da Vinci Code. ↩︎
- Dunno if she’s actually wearing a true Carabinieri uniform (she is, of course, not a Carabinieri), but the word is too cool to resist. ↩︎
- The ultimate beatdown involving Bond (Sean Connery, of course) and Grant is one of my all-time favorite movie brawls. Seeing Ana kick Tom’s ass would be fun too, but, you know, different. ↩︎
- “Beauty awakens the soul to act”, Dante’s description of Beatrice’s effect on him, is quoted in Inferno. ↩︎
