‘Inferno’ sizzles as latest Dan Brown installment

To call “Inferno” the best of the Dan Brown series of books featuring globe-trotting professor Robert Langdon is indeed faint praise.

This is the third installment in which Langdon, played with earnest conviction by Tom Hanks, rushes around the world to piece together historic puzzles and stop various attempts at global domination/destruction. And while much of Brown’s novels deal with religious texts and societies, it’s rather ironic that the films based on them all feel so...soulless.

In “Inferno” we are plopped right into the middle of the action, with Langdon waking up in a Florence hospital, suffering from head trauma which leaves him believing he is stuck in a Marilyn Manson video. Thankfully, he landed in the care of a comely doctor, Sienna Brooks (played by Felicity Jones), who also happens to speak fluent English, is a fast runner, and believes all his babbling of being tracked by international assassins. The “objet de vertu” in this outing is a stick-like Viewmaster that projects Botticelli’s “Abyss of Hell,” as influenced by Dante’s “Inferno.” Concurrently, there is a mad scientist (played by Ben Foster) interested in wiping out humanity with a virus called “Inferno.”

Hey! That’s the name of the movie! (You can almost hear director Ron Howard, who narrated “Arrested Development,” yell this out when it’s announced on screen).

Speaking of Howard, he returns to helm here, after the underwhelming “The DaVinci Code” and “Angels & Demons,” and David Koepp once again adapts it to the screen. Though all feel obligated to explain every revelation to the point of holding the audience's’ hands. It grinds to a halt whatever ludicrous action the original story has in store and adds little to the overall storyline. Hanks does his damndest, but this series has never seemed tailored for his “America’s Dad” delivery.

Jones, who made significant steps toward stardom with last year’s “The Theory of Everything,” is reduced to Langdon’s Euro-babe Arm Candy, Version 3.0, run around the chaos, and look in horror as he points to more maps. And, despite some moderately interesting (but inconsequential) action set pieces, we are still force-fed line after line of dialogue that feels as though it was translated into Korean and back to English. Action is given a Wikipedia gloss that highlights the various meaningless trivia designed to cue us in on just how important all this stuff is.

It’s not. And the larger elements of the plot wouldn’t even have made for an interesting James Bond film during Roger Moore’s reign. If it were to shed its own self-importance and embrace the collective nonsense, it might have made an engaging installment in the “National Treasure” franchise with Nicolas Cage. But there was apparently too much pedigree behind and in front of the camera to crack a smile in “Inferno.” Instead, just as the prior two releases, it stares as its audience with a humorless glance and can barely muster a Mona Lisa smile.