Someone else chose the film, so I expected nothing. I had a vague idea that it might be an animated movie based on Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. It was not. It is actually based on a video game also released in 2010.

That being said, Dante is not looking for God, as in the poem, he is in Hell to find the soul of his beloved Beatrice, whom he betrayed and therefore was taken by the Devil, right after his whole family was killed, mostly because of him. What can I say, the woman bet with the Devil that in three years in the Crusades, her guy never touched another woman. Girls really believe these things.

Anyway, each circle of Hell is animated differently, I guess by different animation teams. The styles are all what I call "American Rock and Roll", though, something like an early offshoot of Disney animation, that then got bad ass and full of anger. I mostly liked the animation and if only for that Dante's Inferno is watchable.

The story is another matter entirely. The guy enters Hell and kills everything he gets his eyes upon, barring his mother and girlfriend, including demons and even Satan (twice! :) ). I was watching the film and I was wondering how could Alighieri have written something that feels like Rambo in Hell. Only afterward did I find that the plot is based on a video game.

So, based on the animation (and on the fact that most animation movies now are crap) I give it a slightly above average. Plot: ridiculous. Therefore the resulting below average mark.

I quite enjoyed this animated feature version of Dante's Inferno (An Animated Epic, it says here modestly), but I wouldn't pretend that it was 100% successful. My knowledge of Dante's poem is sketchy, so I can't comment on how closely (or not) this film followed it. I'm even less familiar with the video game which gave rise to this so, again, I can't comment.

Taken on its own, the visuals are very striking - impressively so - but they suffer from the fact that multiple animation houses have been used. That was something which worked well in The Animatrix and Gotham Knight, where the standalone nature of the individual episodes facilitates - embraces, perhaps, a diversity of animation styles. Here, a switch of styles loses the continuity which a single narrative requires.

The voice performances are not well served by the script: both tend towards the melodramatic at worst and the merely functional at best.

Even so, if you are an animation fan and you have a leaning towards the fantastic (and the gory and the mildly sexual) you may well find there is a moderate amount to enjoy here.

Dante, a knight, returns from the crusades only to find that Something Bad Happened while he was gone. He goes to Hell, going through all nine levels(including the sewer one), engaging many creatures(most from other mythologies than the Christian one... and this *does* criticize the theology some, if I'd have liked it to do so to a greater extent)... fortunately for him, he can cut through most of them with his sword or a scythe... getting to the deepest one where the devil wants to marry his wife, because apparently even the lord of evil can't screw someone if there isn't a ring on that finger... hey, don't ask me. This is based on a game I've never played and barely know anything about. The voice acting is OK, but I wish they'd speak up, or turn the volume down on the otherwise good FX. It is fun, fast-paced, and has good action, except for when you can't tell the dimensions or where people are in relation to one another. Epic? Sure, if that doesn't require an actual story. The animation varies, partially because they keep changing who does it. There is a ton of bloody, gory violence and disturbing content and some nudity and sex in this. I recommend this to fans of bad-assery that has to do with religion in some way. 7/10