‘Inferno’ is like a vacation — a brain vacation

The movie presents us with a series of popular destinations, all of which are photographed exquisitely, and over and over we find ourselves thinking, “Oh, I’ve been there! I remember that!” Or “That looks great, I have to go there.”

[...] if you put monetary considerations aside (which is a little like pushing a gorilla to the side), the movie almost qualifies as an act of collective altruism:

Director Ron Howard and a talented cast set out to entertain — and succeed — all the while knowing that their reputations are not exactly going to be enhanced by this enterprise.

The movie begins the festivities by throwing us into a sure-fire situation.

A nice young doctor (Felicity Jones) tells him that his head was grazed by a bullet, that someone tried to kill him, and that the trauma has resulted in a temporary state of amnesia.

Next thing you know, an assassin shows up at the hospital, and the doctor is pushing a very tired, disoriented symbols professor down the stairs, out the door and into the cab.

For the sake of our children and our children’s children, he wants to kill half the people on the planet.

Not only are private assassins in pursuit, but so are the Italian police, members of an elite security firm and emissaries of the World Health Organization.

Shifts in plot and character reversals arrive with a will of their own, and it becomes entertaining in itself to watch the actors try to find logical justifications for the utter nonsense coming out of their mouths.

Brown tosses garbage out of a speeding car, and each time, the actors catch it and arrange it beautifully before it hits the ground.

The movie wants us to believe that a Swiss WHO doctor is Langdon’s great love, and of course that makes sense, not because Langdon would ever meet such a woman, but because we saw the same actress —Sidse Babett Knudsen — with Hanks in “Hologram for the King.”

[...] if that were to happen, you’d want costume designer Julian Day picking out your clothes.