#71 INFERNO

Starring Tom Hanks, Felicity Jones, Omar Sy, Ben Foster, Sidse Babett Knudsen and Irrfan Khan. Directed by Ron Howard. Written by David Koepp. Budget $75 million. Running time 121 minutes long. Certificate 12a

Ben Foster is the young, billonaire genius with a plan to save the world by killing off 50% of the population. Tom Hanks is the nerdy, middle-aged scholar who's good at solving cryptic-clue crossword puzzles out to stop him and everyone else is just there to cloud the waters, chuck red herrings and briefly take turns taking the center stage as the villain (or are they) until the end gently rolls to a stop and we all go home.

Sustaining a completely horizontal level of excitement from beginning to end and offering nothing but red herrings, this is a film that takes us on a whistle stop tour of Florence, Venice and Istanbul while Hanks' Robert Langdon tries to solve the clues that'll lead the goodies to a bomb that if detonated while release a man-made plague called Inferno. All Langdon has to go on is the help of once child genius, now English surgeon Felicity Jones, ex paramour Sidse Babett Knudsen and an assortment of other characters who might not be all they seem.

This just putted along until ending, drip feeding us information, despite the fact that we, the audience, have already arrived at the ending well before Howard and his crew of film makers.

Bland and surprisingly flat, this was an adequate enough affair that mildly entertained while it was on but then promptly disappeared from your memory the moment you'd left the cinema.

5/10