Inferno

It's the rare movie indeed that squanders the talent and presence of Tom Hanks, one of the most liked and most reliable stars around. I can only recall a handful of movies in his long career in which he's been horribly miscast or he himself has made missteps in bringing a character to life.

So Inferno, the third in a series of films adapting the mystery novels of Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, has that going for it, at the very least.

And that is about all it has going for it.

Even by the somewhat shabby and throw away standards of its predecessors The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons - seriously, I have a shiny two-dollar coin for anyone who can tell me what happened in Angels and Demons without consulting Google - Inferno is a dull and muddled mess. That's especially depressing when you have dependable people like Hanks in front of the camera and director Ron Howard behind it.

But even talented individuals can only do so much with mediocre material, and Inferno's barely comprehensible plot makes the task pretty darn difficult in this case. The story kicks off with Hanks' professor of 'symbology' (not a thing) Robert Langdon waking up in a hospital room in the Italian city of Florence with a nasty head wound and a fuzzy memory. Luckily, young doctor Sienna Brooks (Felicity Jones) is there to fill in a few blanks, not to mention lead him to safety when a gun-toting assassin in a police uniform comes striding down the hospital hallway.

Finding themselves on the run from various law-enforcement types with various ill-defined motives, our plucky pair soon surmises they've found themselves in the middle of a plot hatched by billionaire boffin Bertrand Zobrist (Ben Foster) to radically reduce the planet's population by unleashing a deadly virus.

But because we're in a Dan Brown story, Langdon and Dr Brooks have the chance to halt this plague before it begins if they can solve a few puzzles involving ancient artefacts, sculptures and paintings.

As world-ending schemes go, Zobrist's is of course among the dumbest ever conceived.

But that's par for the course in Inferno, which seems to believe dropping the name of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri once every two minutes is a shortcut to being smart. This is a terrible movie all round, really - sloppy in conception and slapdash in execution. Still, everyone involved got to visit some lovely cities in Italy and Turkey, so I guess that counts for something.