‘Inferno’ is yet another dumb, sensational thriller

Dan Brown movies always tease us with significance. His novels and the subsequent films incorporate lots of rich religious, artistic and architectural lore. But tease us is all they ever do, because all those historical references and aesthetic allusions are ultimately irrelevant. Brown and his film director, Ron Howard, are much more interested in making dumb, sensationalistic thrillers.

The third and, I hope, last in the series of Dan Brown adaptations, after “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Demons,” is called “Inferno.”

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It once again stars Tom Hanks as so-called “symbologist” Robert Langdon, a world-renowned academic who’s steeped in art history and religious iconography. That specialty comes in handy because he will have to ferret out hidden clues in the works of Dante, the paintings of Botticelli, and the grand churches of Florence, Venice, and Istanbul, all in order to prevent a cataclysmic event.

A cataclysm? Yes, courtesy of an American billionaire genius named Bertrand Zobrist, who has one big and dangerous idea. Overpopulation is threatening the survival of the human race, and his remedy is a virus that will wipe out half the human race. As he explains in a kind of TED talk: “There’s a switch. If you throw it, half the people of Earth will die. But if you don’t, in a hundred years the human race will be extinct. You are humanity’s final hope.”

As with all these kinds of movies, Hanks/Langdon has only 48 hours to locate and stop the release of this deadly virus, dubbed “Inferno.” And this race against the clock is compounded by the always devilishly clever Dan Brown villain who teases him with riddles and puzzles and a few red herrings amidst the clues planted in historic churches and museums throughout Europe.

The fact that Hanks/Langdon has to figure out all these elaborate clues while he’s also being chased by all sorts of people — local police, anonymous assassins, private security goons, World Health Organization honchos, and even a few World Health renegades — shows just how ridiculous this movie gets.

But to demonstrate the level of ridiculousness to which this movie is willing to stoop to, I’m going to have to issue a minor spoiler alert. This is just one of many, many confusions that Hanks/Langdon has to clear up, so knowing this shouldn’t ruin whatever pleasure the film overall might bring.

Spoiler alert for Dan Brown’s “Inferno”

Okay, here it is. Early on in the film, Hanks/Langdon loses consciousness and wakes up in a hospital completely disoriented. The attending doctor records him muttering over and over something that sounds like “very sorry, very sorry, very sorry.”

When he comes to, Hanks/Langdon can’t explain why he kept apologizing again and again. Then, halfway through the movie that verbal mystery is solved! He figures out he was saying “Vasari. Vasari. Vasari” — the name of an Italian Renaissance painter, whose most famous painting held yet another clue. How Dan Brown can write this stuff and Ron Howard can film this stuff with straight faces is beyond me.