Columbia Pictures, Imagine Entertainment, LStar Capital, Mid Atlantic Films
Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Omar Sy, Irrfan Khan, Ben Foster, Sidse Babett Knudsen
Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is back for the third installment of the Dan Brown novel in the “Da Vinci Code” and “Angels & Demons” series. This time he wakes up in a hospital in Italy with virtually no memory of what happened to him. His nurse, Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones) tries to help him with his recovery and with his memory, but someone is out to get him, and so the end up chasing all over Europe trying to solve the mystery of a evil plot to release the plague virus on the world. This time it’s based on a picture of the levels of hell in Dante’s “Inferno” and trying to decode the message and save the world is a very challenging task in this high energy spy like thriller.
What is it they call Robert? It’s like symbologist or something like that, if that’s a word. Is there such a thing? Anyway, this film is directed by Ron Howard, so it’s a high tech action thriller and all that. I wasn’t completely sold on the whole thing. There wasn’t anything wrong with Tom Hanks or Felicity Jones’ performance that put me off, and there was lots of explosions, tension, chases, suspense, and all that, but I find these stories a little bit confusing and hard to follow. Yes, eventually they figure it all out and they get it, but the focus on how he decodes these ancient messages from common works of art is sometimes just more than I care to know. Ian Fleming’s 007 has been saving the world from evil madmen for years and years, and it never gets old because the villain always takes to time to tell his plot to take over the world and manages to keep it simple stupid. (KISS). In these series of films the effort is in trying to make me understand how he uses symbols, solves clues, and gets secret decoder ring messages in a way that totally loses my interest and goes over my head. This is a prime reason why I have not really liked any of these three films. It’s just a bit off putting for me, and though Hanks and Jones and their friends and enemies put in a really good effort with wonderful acting and though it is exciting and looks great, one cylinder was missing and I was just bombarded by the hidden meaning of rearranging Dante’s levels of hell that I found, let’s face it, basically tedious and boring. That’s why I think a lot of these types of films are better done than the Da Vinci Code series, and why I’ve never had a desire to read the books, either. I wouldn’t say that it’s not worth it to watch it, especially on DVD or streaming, but just don’t expect to be blown away with the wonderful plot. Goldfinger’s plan to set off a nuclear bomb in Fort Knox to turn all the gold toxic was a lot easier for me to follow. 🙂 Ron Howard did a good job and it looks great, but the novel was a bit hard to turn into a movie that popped.
