The world’s most famous symbologist wakes up in an Italian hospital with no memory of the past several days. While an ordinary professor of religious iconology might have simply lost time on a few auditorium lectures and perhaps an interview with C-SPAN, Robert Langdon (once again played by money-printing machine Tom Hanks) has somehow forgotten that he’s broken into a museum and stolen the death mask of Dante Alighieri and gotten himself caught up in an international plan to unleash an plague upon the Earth. Now, with a beautiful young doctor (Felicity Jones) at his side, he’s forced to fight against the CGI visions in his head and explain a bunch of bullshit about Dante’s Inferno in order to stop an extinction level event. All in all, a slightly more stressful than average Wednesday for Langdon.
This is the third film in a series of adaptations of Dan Brown bestsellers, following The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Angels & Demons (2009). Oddly, it’s based on the fourth of Brown’s Langdon novels. The 2009 Freemason-themed novel The Lost Symbol was apparently deemed not sufficiently apocalyptic to warrant another two hours of big screen time. Ron Howard returns once again to sit in the canvas fold-up director’s chair, but David Koepp, who co-wrote last installment with Akiva Goldsman, is now alone in front of the copy of Final Draft. No worries, though—he wrote Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull all by himself, so he’s more than up to the task.
Inferno roars into theaters October 28.