Dante’s Sins-Tom Hanks’ Inferno –A Film Review (2016)

By Sam Lowell

Inferno, starring Tom Hanks, 2016 

Blame it on Dante, blame it on his conception of the twelve billion or whatever number there were rings of hell if you like. Blame it on guys, billionaire guys who get a little squirrelly with all that dough gotten from inventing some doo-dad that could be used as a vehicle for some advertising platforms and hence a hefty IPO. That is the blame part in the film under review, Inferno (you know from old man Dante’s inferno made hotter by his doomed love for the fair Beatrice but that is only sub-text here). But the solving the dilemma, the enigma part is left to the good offices a Cambridge (England, okay) professor played by Tom Hanks (although his apparent lack of knowledge of Italian makes me a little suspicious of his academic credentials-but I am not a conspiracy theorist-of course maybe he just immersed himself in Latin the language of discourse in Dante’s time).            

Now this is a thriller so the Dante theme, the bringing in of a Dante scholar from Cambridge requires a little explanation. This high tech billionaire, does his name matter, whose new found wealth has made him like many of his ilk awash in a messianic complex, awash in thinking that his billions allowed him to tweak society any way he liked (usually they just do seemingly innocuous stuff like skewing the educational system with charter schools). The new messiah billionaire here though is worried about human extinction, worried as we all should by the world population explosion pressing against finite resources. So bright boy decided that he would “thin the herd” not like old Malthus with a little starvation but with the new plague which would cut the world population in half allowing the other half to prosper. Who would, or would not survive was to be left to chance-or the survival of the fittest. In any case this goof had to be stopped, stopped in the name of crusty old humanity. So the World Health Organization (WHO) the natural agency to stop this madness brought in the good professor to solve the clues involving Dante’s Inferno (and Botticelli’s picture of what that might look like) which the billionaire left for his followers after he committed suicide (with a little help from a rogue WHO agent seeing his main chance for serious dough).        

So the chase was on to stop the madness before one of the billionaire’s acolytes found its location and sprung the plague on the world (or half the world). But there are nefarious agents afloat who want to stop the good professor from helping the WHO and who either want to sell the biological weapon to the highest bidder or who are acolytes determined to carrying out the later billionaire’s sullen plan. The good professor is helped by a young doctor trying to help him recover his memory and find out why people are trying to kill him. The professor along with the good doctor are pushed hither and yon by the various clues hidden in museums and churches in Florence, Venice and ultimately Istanbul if you can believe that. The whole caper was a very close thing but naturally the good professor (and his good gal ex-lady friend in the WHO who had recruited him to help) figured enough out to save the world-no sweat). And that helpful doctor-well watch the film. By the way spare us from messianic billionaires with screwy social ideas and the dough to carry them out.  A good fast paced thriller.