Tom Hanks is Our Greatest Living Actor. This is nowhere more evident than in Sir Hanks’ latest and most triumphant role, a man of international intrigue, dashing panache, and unparalleled heroism—David S. Pumpkins, the character Lord Thomas of Hanks brilliantly portrayed on last week’s episode of Saturday Night Live.
David S. Pumpkins does not appear in Inferno.
Instead, we get Robert Langdon, the Harvard professor of “symbology” who appeared in two previous movies, The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons. All three are based on unfathomably popular books by Dan Brown, and four out of five Americans have done the following: bought a copy in an airport bookstore, read it to page 30, fallen asleep, and left it behind on the plane. Discarded copies of Brown’s literary oeuvre were the primary building material used in the construction of JFK’s giant, sparkling, new Terminal 4.