Robert Langdon’s latest adventure Inferno is worth just one star

FILM REVIEW: Take Inferno’s red herrings and raw prawns at face value and you should take something to prevent plague-like symptoms of your own.

INFERNO (M)

Director: Ron Howard (Rush)

Starring: Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Irrfan Khan, Omar Sy, Ben Foster.

Rating: 1 / 5

Leaves a burning sensation in all the wrong places

Just over a month ago, Tom Hanks was Sully. Now he’s just silly.

But that has been par for the course ever since Hanks first stepped into the role of chipper cryptologist Robert Langdon a decade ago.

In previous screen adventures absent-mindedly ripped from the pages of books by author Dan Brown, Mr Langdon has nobly identified patterns, completed puzzles and joined many dastardly dots to save Christianity from going up in flames (The Da Vinci Code), and the Vatican from going down the gurgler (Angels & Demons).

Even though there are still plenty of hairy religious conspiracies that could use a short-back-and-sides from the sharp mind of Langdon, our hero is no longer confining himself to grinding bad God-botherers down to a pulp.

If he can successfully complete his latest assignment, Robert Langdon is going to save the world.

As he already has plenty of scores on the board when it comes to solving insurmountable problems and paradoxes at blinding speed, Inferno goes out of its way to make the job ten times tougher.

Tom Hanks returns as Robert Langdon, with Felicity Jones as Sienna in a scene on the balcony of Basilica di San Marco in Venice. Pictures: Columbia Pictures

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This time around, Bob has been stripped of his legendary weapons of mass deduction. As Inferno begins, he’s copped a nuclear knock to the noggin that has left him with the same case of amnesia that Jason Bourne was recently cured of.

So by the time Langdon is back on his feet and running for his life all over Italy (and later on, Turkey), he is already way behind the eight-ball when it comes to stopping a pestilence about to sweep the planet.

A mad scientist-cum-motivational speaker (Ben Foster) has created a synthetic version of the Black Plague. And though he isn’t sticking around to see his handiwork go viral — that’s him throwing himself off a building in the opening scene — the dead villain has plenty of devotees ready to do his posthumous bidding.

Therefore a brain-wiped Langdon is going to have to take the longest and laughably logic-free route imaginable to prevent the disastrous disease from being released.

The plague is sitting inside a sealed plastic bag on the bottom of an indoor lagoon in downtown Istanbul, and can only be activated by mobile phone from a few metres away.

This is no spoiler: but as far as final-act doomsday devices go, this whole scenario proves about as terrifying as watching someone about to defuse a black bowling-ball bomb. Complete with an unfeasibly long flickering wick.

Langdon and Sienna are going to save the world in Inferno, the latest Dan Brown novel. Picture: Columbia Pictures

Then there is the ropy role played here by the World Health Organisation.

Do they really have a secret squad of gun-toting commandos operating outside of international law? And a fleet of private jets to scramble them from one picturesque hotspot to the next?

They do now. Get used to it.

And what about the shadowy mob known as The Consortium, which Inferno reveals is able to kill, inject or lobotomise any citizen of the free world from their HQ on a boat in the middle of the ocean?

Don’t ask.

Omar Sy, who starred in Burnt and X Men: Days of Future Past, in a scene from Columbia Pictures' Inferno. Picture: Columbia Pictures

So it goes for the whole of Inferno, the plotting of which is perpetually dumping fresh loads of red herrings and raw prawns upon the audience.

Take any of this at face value, and you really should be taking something to prevent plague-like symptoms of your own.

Yes Tom who have taken Robert Langdon too far in Inferno. Pictures: Columbia Pictures