Inferno

Presumably it’s not as bad as descending through the layers of hell, but Inferno crashes and burns despite its talent on both sides of the camera.

This third installment in the big-budget franchise brings together star Tom Hanks, director Ron Howard, and author Dan Brown (The DaVinci Code) for another preposterous thriller meshing ancient artifacts with Roman Catholic legends and high-tech global crime conspiracies.

Hanks returns as Robert Langdon, a Harvard cryptologist who wakes up in a hospital bed in Florence with an apparent case of short-term amnesia that renders him clueless as to how he got there. When it quickly becomes apparent that someone is chasing him, he escapes with his nurse, Sienna (Felicity Jones), to sort things out.

Afflicted with headaches and nightmarish visions, Langdon’s resulting whirlwind adventure (with Sienna as his sidekick) is spurred by a possible link between Dante’s titular poem and a billionaire activist (Ben Foster) who has schemed to unleash a virus to combat worldwide overpopulation.

Things get rolling with sequences involving paintings by Botticelli and Vasari, a visit to the Palazzo Vecchio, the mysterious theft of a high-profile artwork, and confrontations with multiple potentially unscrupulous rogue agencies.

Howard’s technical proficiency and slick visual style help disguise the film’s lack of dramatic substance. He capably stages the action amid exotic European landmarks and locales, keeps the pace zipping along agreeably, and assembles fragmented hallucination sequences with flair.

The screenplay by David Koepp (Angels and Demons) is sporadically thrilling but frequently incoherent, generating only mild suspense as it tosses around red herrings and clues to its narrative puzzle.

Of course, there are plentiful twists regarding character motives, government corruption and institutional cover-ups building to an elaborate finale. That might be enough to please aficionados of the source material. Yet while many of the intended surprises come off as far-fetched and arbitrary, most moviegoers aren’t likely to have much inclination to follow Langdon down another rabbit hole.

Although Hanks brings his usual charisma to a familiar role, most of these collaborators have resumes loaded with superior efforts, making this project seem like more of a cash grab driven more by financial than creative goals.

Meanwhile, the film’s historical perspective is pretty, um, embellished. As with previous installments in the franchise, Western civilization students are advised not to use Inferno to cheat on their tests.

Rated PG-13, 121 minutes.