Bored to Death: INFERNO

There are worse movies than Inferno, movies so inept, confused, ill-considered, or offensive they’re impossible to defend let alone sit through. But that makes it all the more depressing to realize Inferno is the only thing a movie can be that’s worse than bad. It is boring. I don’t mean to say it is slow or off-putting or strange or lazy. No, it is just deafeningly empty from the first frame to the last, completely devoid of interest or entertainment. If it was a bad movie it could at least kick up ludicrous silliness or something so mind-bogglingly tone deaf it’d be worth unpacking. Here we simply have a movie with no real reason to exist, incapable of making an argument for itself. It merely is, playing out with all the excitement and urgency of a talented group of Hollywood craftspeople signing off on a contractual obligation. It’s the kind of movie so tediously uninteresting you wonder if it was possible everyone was sleepwalking behind the scenes, or maybe trading sightseeing tips for their European downtime on Sony’s dime.

Clearly a commercial commitment, Sony couldn’t indefinitely sit on the rights to Dan Brown’s successful books about Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, not after director Ron Howard and star Tom Hanks turned them into two good-sized hits already. The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Angels & Demons (2009) were not great thrillers, but at least they had their pulpy fun pretending their plot mechanics were wrapped in learning, with history lectures and Catholic conspiracy. Any movies that can feature both lengthy art appreciation monologues and Paul Bettany as a self-flagellating albino monk (in the first) or Ewan McGregor as a Cardinal parachuting out of an exploding helicopter (in the second) can’t be all bad. These were fairly self-serious works, B-movies impressed by their own footnotes and inflated with big budgets and big stars. Still, nothing prepared me for how exhausted and joyless Inferno was. Compared to this new film, its predecessors are models of humble, slight, and economical filmmaking. This one stumbles through an endless bleary plot without a single second of rooting interest, believable stakes, or photographic interest. 

It starts with Langdon (Hanks) waking up in a Florence hospital suffering amnesia from a head wound. His doctor (Felicity Jones) tells him he was attacked. Confused and suffering hallucinogenic flashes of horror imagery – the movie takes glum grotesqueries as humdrum – Langdon flees with his caretaker after a policewoman opens fire on them. Now he must remember why he’s now wrapped up in a globetrotting art-adjacent adventure, racing to prevent an apocalyptic event. Because he’s done sort of thing twice before he’s well equipped to get up to speed as he fumbles around the scrambled passages of his mind. Maybe it has something to do with the visual representation of Dante’s Inferno he finds in his pocket, and which has been altered to include clues to a hidden cache of plague virus that would wipe out 95% of the world’s population if unleashed. You can see why the World Health Organization, which this movie imagines operates as an international SWAT team, is hot on their trail. The mystery is why they think Langdon has something to do with it.

I can forgive many an incredulously strained plot, but see if you can follow this. Say you were a brilliant but eccentric sociopathic billionaire scientist with a goal of reversing the world’s overpopulation with your custom-made plague. You’ve hidden it in a bag that’ll blow up on a certain day and time. Would you: A.) tell no one, sit back quietly, and let it do its thing; or B.) throw yourself off a building, leaving behind an elaborate set of art-history scavenger hunt clues leading to your biological weapon of mass destruction? I get when Langdon is investigating a conspiracy with historical roots why sussing out clues in paintings and monuments is a helpful strategy, but why would Inferno’s villain (Ben Foster) create new clues on old art? If he was really intent on kickstarting the apocalypse, why leave room for a professor to figure it out and stop you? There’s little motivation behind anyone’s behavior in this movie, including WHO agents (Sidse Babett Knudsen and Omar Sy) and a mysterious fixer whose office is aboard a freighter in the Adriatic (Irrfan Khan). They change sides a couple times each for seemingly no reason other than cheap surprise.

Inferno is a movie that’ll test a lot of assumptions. Think between Ron Howard directing and David Koepp writing they could surely cobble together a half-interesting story? Think national treasure Tom Hanks could reliably deploy his star power? Think a supporting cast of fine actors could bring something to the table? Think some solid, reliable Hollywood craft – cinematography from occasional Howard collaborator Salvatore Totino, score from the busy Hans Zimmer – could at least render a movie watchable? Prepare to be disappointed. It’s an entire movie of people going through the motions. It can’t even make stunning locales in Florence, Venice, and Istanbul look like the good museum-hopping travelogue thriller it could’ve been. The movie is cramped and ugly – maybe the better to emphasize its villain’s complaint about too many people? – and the way the plot unfolds around an amnesiac hero is treated for mere confusion. This only serves to hobble what should be a swaggering Hanks by making him squint and stagger while reading clues to the other characters, dragged along by the boring plot without clear drive or goals of his own. He can’t remember why he’s there or why he should care, and I could relate. The only reason to see this movie is if you want a dark room in which you could nap for a couple hours.

Whale of a Tale: IN THE HEART OF THE SEA

Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea tells of a whaling ship sunk by an enormous whale, this story nestled inside a framing device in which Herman Melville, many years later, interviews the last surviving crewman as research for writing Moby-Dick. This structure gives the movie a gloss of both history and literature, purporting to tell the real story that inspired a Great American Novel, while engaging with some of the same imagery and texture of the work itself. It’s a neat trick. The movie is slow and steady, lurching out to sea with the Essex and her crew of whalers, then watches patiently as rocky waves and clever whales go from a position of being conquered to the engines of the men’s ruin. It’s a sturdy maritime movie, of rudders and rigging, anchors and fish, hardtack and ambergris. The scenes of Melville earnestly listening to the old seaman’s tale are a bit obvious and clumsy, but the core of the picture is an admirably stripped-down survival story, vividly recreated, handsomely staged with convincing effects.

The screenplay by Charles Leavitt (Blood Diamond), based on a book by historian Nathaniel Philbrick, introduces simple characters. The proud first mate (Chris Hemsworth), resentful after being passed over for a promotion, is driven to do what’s best for the ship. The captain (Benjamin Walker) is the son of the boat’s patron, and therefore worried about proving his toughness on this, his first whaling expedition. Meanwhile, the ship has a naïve newbie (Tom Holland), who has a lot to learn, and is therefore our guide into the blood and muck of harpooning a whale, butchering it on deck, and scooping out all the valuable goo inside it. (He’ll grow up to be Brendan Gleeson, reluctantly telling the story to Ben Whishaw’s Melville.) The rest of the crewmen blur together behind their tough beards and mumbling accents, a mostly undifferentiated ensemble to take orders, fill the frame, and get in harm’s way when the danger surfaces.

It’s not so much a narrative of character and incident as it is interested in details of sailing and whaling, in the sensations of life at sea, and in the specifics of the survivors’ endurance. Howard is always great with directing reenactments, from the space shuttle mechanics of Apollo 13, his best film, to the visceral car races of Rush and impressive fires of Backdraft. With his latest film, he has cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (Slumdog Millionaire) shooting from interesting vantage points, with a seasick woozy feeling to the cameras’ movements. Perhaps they were inspired by Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab’s experimental fishing documentary Leviathan, because they make liberal use of canted or otherwise unusual angles to show off details of labor at sea. A repeated shot will hold extreme close-ups of a rope or knife, an oar or bucket, the man manipulating any given tool in the extreme background as we focus on the work being done. In less stylized moments, dialogue scenes, the camera bobs and sways, rocking with the waves. It wouldn’t surprise me if people seeing this in IMAX get seasick.

There’s a certain element of spectacle in this film that’s big, satisfying, and striking. I’m thinking of a side shot of a rowboat, the camera just underneath the water, pulling downwards as a whale’s tail slaps, shattering the boat and plunging silhouetted figures into the depths. Elsewhere, wide-angle shots show tiny boats against vast expanses of sun-dappled water. And one late moment finds blurry fish-eyed angles on sea gulls chattering above, while a sun-dried groggy man (so starved he looks scarily skeletal) spies land. Howard directs with an interesting eye, perhaps the most visually experimental he’s ever been. You never know who’ll surprise you, I suppose. But where In the Heart of the Sea, which is otherwise often curiously unengaging, most resonates is in connections it draws between images that catch one by surprise and man’s hopelessness in the face of nature.

No wonder the characters are thinly drawn, and their journey simple. It’s not about individuals who are in conflict against the storm of unpredictable weather and wildlife. It’s more elemental, about a Herzog-ian conflict between the inherent dangers of the wild, and the struggle for men to make meaning out of it. The climax is not a moment of terror or violence, but a moment of grace, a man and a whale making eye contact, and finding some silent understanding. (From a whale’s perspective, Moby-Dick must be not only metaphor, but also a superhero.) The film is wrapped in a conclusion that tidies up the plot in comforting middlebrow ways on the surface, but underneath lingers the pain and struggle of the men’s survival, and the violence that we do to the creatures that share our planet. It’s a cycle: the power of storytelling to communicate the darkness we’re capable of committing to live to tell the tale.

Speed Racers: RUSH

It’s amazing to see how anyone’s life turns into biopic cliché when run through the Hollywood prestige drama machinery. There’s the early rising promise, the problems with health and/or addiction, and then the inevitable triumphant comeback. We’ve seen it all so many times before. Where Ron Howard’s Rush steps smartly and does much to combat the pitfalls of its genre is in the way it bifurcates the based-on-a-true-story of 1970’s Formula 1 racing rivals Niki Lauda and James Hunt. It’s two biopics in one, gaining excitement and energy from crackling two variations of the clichés off of the other. It allows the men to seem in some ways equally insufferably arrogant and admirably dedicated to their careers. We can see why they’d come to see each other as professional enemies, as well as why they’d come to admire the other’s professional bravery.

As James Hunt, Chris Hemsworth (Thor himself) humanizes what could’ve easily been less a man and more a monster of machismo. Tall, blonde, muscled, he’s a rippling mass of self-satisfaction and self-confidence. He’s a jerk. It’s hard to care about him, but Hemsworth’s brings to the part creeping insecurities that sometimes temper harsh judgments without excusing his behavior. Similarly, Niki Lauda could be seen as only cold and calculating, using technical precision and cutting remarks to win without caring what others think of him. But as played by Daniel Brühl (the Nazi propaganda star from Inglourious Basterds) he becomes a man whose unstoppable need to prove himself is intensely sympathetic and just as much a potential danger.

Tracing their rivalry, the film follows their careers in the 1970s as they meet again and again on the racetrack. Their ascents are intertwined; one’s biggest failures on the track the other’s biggest successes. Between races, much attention is paid to the politics of corporate sponsorships and relationships with pit crews and mechanics. There’s also a token amount of romantic interest as Hunt and Lauda each find women (Olivia Wilde and Alexandra Maria Lara, respectively) who love them enough to have the thankless task of serving as cutaway reaction shots during the races to underscore how dangerous it all is. They’ve got something to lose.

The screenplay by Peter Morgan (of The Queen and Frost/Nixon, among other films like them) has his characteristic insight into the based-on-real-people characters’ psychology and their relationships with each other. It also suffers from his characteristically stiff dramaturgy and the kind of clumsy narration that often insists on telling us exactly what people are thinking when the acting on display would and could do just as well. But for all the clunky dialogue and routine biopic paces, the film takes off at top speed, hurtling through cliché with a blistering sense of stirring, energized sports’ movie hokum. I’d like to think a movie about any job, even, say, rival pencil-pushers, could have a great deal of entertainment value if done right, but the fact that these men have careers racing cars is a gift that the filmmakers sure don’t squander. It becomes the film’s greatest asset.

Foregrounding Hunt and Lauda’s needs for speed in a continual quest to best the others, Rush is muscular, speedy, and masculine. Pistons pump, sparkplugs fire, and motors roar. The film bursts with bruising sound design and a thunderous Hans Zimmer score. It’s practically Bruckheimerian. Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography rattles at top speed, images blurring, edited to smash one into the next, then the next, next, next. The cars fly down the track at top speeds, danger around every corner. The death defying nature of the sport is never far from the film’s awareness, an appreciation reflected in the film’s visual bombast. It’s all movement, a blitz of frames Howard marshals with atypical freneticism. No stranger to fast cars – his directorial debut was the 1977 Roger Corman production Grand Theft Auto, after all – he takes Mantle’s propulsive camerawork and makes out of it a film that outraces the sometimes rigidly formulaic writing.

Funny Business: THE DILEMMA

The funniest thing about The Dilemma is that, despite being sold as director Ron Howard’s return to comedy, it’s not very funny. In fact, every time it tries to be funny in a broad, silly way, it falls embarrassingly flat. The comedy seems jammed up into the corners of a somewhat serious drama. If it weren’t for all the straining for laughs in Allan Loeb’s screenplay, this could be a much better film.

It stars Vince Vaughn as a man who plans on proposing to his longtime girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly), following the advice of his happily married best friend (Kevin James). As he scopes out the perfect spot to pop the question, a lovely botanical garden, he notices his friend’s wife (Winona Ryder) making out with some younger guy (Channing Tatum). He takes it upon himself to learn more and ends up sneaking around town peeping in windows and trying desperately to avoid revealing anything before he’s sure of all the facts.

Now saddled with secrets and questions, he squirms about and ends up making each and every social situation more and more difficult as he struggles under the pressure of being the only person in the room tuned in to all of the nasty subtext. So many comedies draw their laughs from the unspoken comedic tensions between characters, that it’s strange, but not entirely unpleasant, to see one throw away the comedy to focus solely on the tension.

After wading through deadly dull scenes of formulaic comedy windup, especially a nonstarter of a subplot involving an awfully miscalculated use of Queen Latifah, things get interesting. For the majority of its runtime, the film functions well as a compelling, wild-eyed melodrama, a darkly depressing look into seemingly normal relationships with deep dysfunction hidden just below the surface. Funnily enough, there are some genuine laughs found amidst the pleasurably agonizing drama in sequences of acute social discomfort. As the web of secrets that supports these characters’ interactions grows more prominent, the romances and friendships involved threaten to collapse altogether.

And then, the movie deflates the tension quickly and clumsily. Tension falls away in favor of a queasily pat and tonally odd ending that feels like it belongs to the opening attempts at comedy instead of the moments it follows. It’s a movie that recovers very nicely from an opening stumble only to fall back into the same traps by the end.

Angels & Demons (2009)

There’s an entertaining thriller somewhere within Angels & Demons, but it’s hidden behind a creaky pace. Tom Hanks is back, looking unusually exhausted and once again without his charisma, as Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist (ha!) who cracked the DaVinci Code. This time he has to stop a plot to destroy the Vatican. The movie is helped by the presence of a literal ticking-bomb scenario but why, then, does everything seem to happen at such a sleepy rate? The movie is intermittently thrilling but never really involving or frightening. By the time the movie turns splendidly pulpy in the last act, it’s too late.

There’s a solid cast of supporting characters. If there's one sure way to liven up a dull B-movie, it has to be: hire European character actors. Ewan McGregor and Armin Mueller-Stahl play officials of the Catholic Church who billow through the ornate cathedrals and archways with a grand sense of purpose and grave portentousness. Stellan Skarsgard is also on hand to huff and puff as head of security and Ayelet Zurer - as a bioentanglement physicist (double ha!) - gets to stand in the background of many scenes (sometimes she even gets to say something). On the whole, this movie is less ponderous and pretentious than DaVinci Code, which leads me to assume that director Ron Howard realized that, despite the high gross, all the people who found the first film a little on the stuffy side were correct. But Mr. Howard has not swung far enough the other way. This time, instead of quietly murmuring monologues of pseudo-historical hogwash, the characters shout it or gasp it while racing through Rome but it’s just as repetitive as the first film. “Blah blah blah cathedral! Blah blah blah statue!” Repeat. The film also helpfully reminds us of major plot points regularly, for the convenience of those who have nodded off between murders.

Speaking of murders, the movie manages to be quite bloodthirsty and the MPAA ratings board has had no qualms about giving the film a PG-13 despite lingering upon brandings, rats gnawing a fresh corpse, one bloody slit throat, and, oh yes, a delightful scene in which a man with a chest wound is given CPR that causes a spurt of blood to soak the face of our hero. And yet Slumdog Millionaire received an R? It would be one thing if the carnage here served a fun, fast plot but it's merely a sad attempt to liven up some dusty proceedings.

In the face of all that brutality, it’s a shock to find that the movie goes soft in other aspects. There’s a legitimate conversation to be had about the respective roles that science and religion play in modern life, and perhaps a summer blockbuster is not the appropriate place to have it, but this movie pays lip service to grander ideas, uses them to fuel its plot, but is never honest about the conflict or lack thereof. I can understand not taking sides so as not to offend any member of the audience, but Ron Howard, and his writers David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman, downplay both sides to such an extent that a member of the audience could be forgiven for assuming that neither side has any point at all. Though such intellectual dishonesty has long marred all movies focus-grouped beyond the point of making any statements about anything, it’s rare to stumble upon one that, if thought through, has the capacity to make one question the basic meaning of life. If both science and faith are wrong, where does that leave us? It’s a good thing that no one goes to these kinds of movies looking for answers to life’s big questions (I hope).

Grotesqueries and hypocrisies aside, the movie manages several scenes of competent thrills and spills amongst some gorgeous production design. Mostly taking place at nightfall, the characters run and stalk through settings choked with atmosphere: cobwebbed caverns and shadowy passageways with dramatic lighting (and dramatic camerawork) accentuate the beautiful architecture of the city. The plot is appropriately twisty and the last act, as previously hinted, goes pleasantly insane with some last minute twists, some Vatican backstabbing and skullduggery, an act of self-martyrdom, and one very large explosion. It’s too bad it takes so long to get there. There’s a fun summer movie to be had at times, and if you’re forced to see it, there are certainly worse ways to spend two conspiracy-minded hours (see, or rather, don't: National Treasure or The DaVinci Code). I just wish someone had been let into the editing room to shave thirty to forty minutes off this thing to make it sail past its tepid attempts to tackle serious topics and get us even faster to the fun.