Inferno

The film is worth one watch in the cinema if you are a Brown or Hanks fan. But not if you are looking for something that better challenges your intellect.

Frankly speaking, one would have to be an amnesiac to rate this film even as a thoughtful thriller!

For a thriller, it doesn't really offer much of a thrill. It's a perfunctory follow up to a formula that saw success 10 years ago but maybe it's time to toss the baby out with the bath water.

It took substantial self-control to resist making fire jokes, but it's now or never, so here goes. Inferno, despite the best efforts of an always-dependable Tom Hanks, burns up in a raging fireball. Sorry.

At the end of the day, everything in Inferno is just about passable. Watch the film if you really want to.

Tom Hanks, Irrfan Khan-starrer is an adaptation of Dan Brown's torturous novel. The only improvement it has on the book is that it ends in two hours.

Overall, when at the very end, you hear "If you loved humanity or this planet, you'd do anything to solve it", you feel let down with all the hype of the Inferno.

The film leaves you with many 'ifs & buts'. If only the story and screenplay were richer. If only the characters were more three-dimensional. If only the last two films hadn't set such a high standard. But that was not to be.

...barring an intriguing opening and a few nicely executed scenes in Italy, Inferno is a strained attempt to capitalise on Robert Langdon's popularity and a far cry from the fast-paced and edge-of-the-seat stuff we have come to expect from the Brown-Howard-Hanks combine.

In the end, the live action films are just like the books they were adapted from: quick fixes to ennui . So watch it and forget it, because it's not memorable. But Inferno is worth one viewing.