*/****
screenplay by Paul Zaloom, Sandow Burk & Sean Meredith
directed by Sean Meredith
by Ian Pugh Dante Alighieri (voice of Dermot Mulroney) is a drunken slacker and Virgil (James Cromwell) packs heat in a 21st-century update of The Inferno populated entirely by puppets crafted from paper–and that's about as far as it goes for cleverness in Sean Meredith's Dante's Inferno, but at least the puppets are well-drawn. Although the concept is daring and the toy theatre action is beautifully choreographed, the intrinsic problem in modernizing the first third of The Divine Comedy is that you're more or less obliged to include various villains and celebrities who've died in the seven centuries since Dante wrote his original masterpiece. All kinds of smug idiocy surrounds the film as a satirical jab against the original work's seriousness (the entryway to Hell is preceded by a "do not back up, severe tire damage" sign; the City of Dis is "a planned community"), but it's the sinners of modern pop culture that truly distract from Alighieri's startlingly complex work, turning it into a parade of indifferent name-checking. We are given a brief preview of the last few circles of Hell with slideshow mugshots of its inhabitants, which soon becomes a literal whirlwind of Nazis, dictators, ex-presidents, and several members of the Rat Pack–and that sequence can stand as a reliable metaphor for the rest of this one-note movie. Dante's Inferno, though, is never worse than when it starts mucking around in modern-day politics: mentioning that Halliburton "has its own building" in the falsifiers' wing; revealing that Dick Cheney is already in the ninth circle; and representing Geryon as a Fox News helicopter. What are they saying, exactly, beyond the fact that these are bad, bad people doing bad, bad things and destined to burn in Hell for it? Call it the malady of modern pseudo-liberal idiots, so consumed with demonizing the ideological enemy (however justifiably) that they don't have anything to say that hasn't been said a thousand times before. Add in a few dopey puns and some tired risqué jokes and you'll find that puppeteering has never been this disgustingly self-satisfied.
