I am not Dan Brown’s biggest fan. His books are getting increasingly harder to slog through, but they all follow the same formula. Something is hidden in something ancient, only Robert Langdon can find it, someone doesn’t want him to find it, cue the albino. His books before The Da Vinci Code were actually much better, but the success of DVC has kept him on an obvious track. I tried to read Inferno, but after 200 pages of descriptions of frescos and palazzos, I couldn’t take it any more. This trailer makes it sound much more interesting. Things must have picked up around page 400 (there were 600 or so to play with).
This is the third film in the Robert Langdon film series with Tom Hanks returning as the symbologist and he’s joined by Felicity Jones. Bluntly, I think both of these people should be out making better movies than this will end up being, but everybody’s gotta have a franchise these days and this is Hanks’. Ron Howard used to be among my favorite directors, but he seems to have lost his way. Last year’s In the Heart of the Sea was odd when it wasn’t boring, and the Dan Brown films have been average at best. We’ll see if they turn things around when Inferno opens on October 28, 2016.
If I were given a truckload of money, and told all I had to do was star in (or direct) a mediocre movie, I would do it in a heartbeat, especially if I had also enjoyed a long and storied career, and knew I would probobly not be remembered for the mediocre movie.
I’ve been known to complain about the DaVinci Code, but I actually didn’t hate the book. I was just amazed that a potato chip novel was being treated like a scholarly work. Don’t get me wrong, I want to BE Dan Brown, but his book became something other than what it was in the public conscousness, and that is too bad. I went on to read Angels and Demons, and even though it came before it was the exact same novel, and that was the end of my experience with Dan Brown.
A film version of DaVinci Code was always going to be a lost cause artistically, because so much of the novel involves intricate discussions of history and art, but it was Howard’s most sucessful film, other than the Grinch. And that is a shame, because the guy is one of the greats, and the biggest, best chameleon in Hollywood.
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It did better than Apollo 13? Jeez.
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