Gerard Butler goes jaw-dropping as Renaissance crime merges with Dante's manuscript quest

Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante drops Gerard Butler into a “quite extraordinary tough-guy role,” and the film commits so hard to its weird Renaissance mafia premise that it almost dares you to look away. It’s an outrageous black comedy that braids Dante’s Divine Comedy with organised crime, then toggles between monochrome and colour as if aesthetics are just another con-tool. The result is hilarious and shocking at least at first, powered by cameos from Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino, and Franco Nero. Then it reveals the film’s central tension: its momentum toward a “violent larceny and spiritual crisis” abruptly loosens into “sentimental fantasy” by the end.

That two-level setup is the engine. Oscar Isaac plays Dante Alighieri in 14th-century Florence, grappling with “his artistic and spiritual destiny,” and also plays Tosches in the US in the era of 9/11. In the Tosches timeline, Isaac’s Tosches is a “louche author and Dante enthusiast” whose aggressive refusal to compromise has alienated publishers and editors, and who now takes a freelance job via a kid from the old neighbourhood. The story insists on a particular kind of conflict: the kind where pride, stubbornness, and survival instincts shape who gets access to the priceless object everyone wants. In the other timeline, John Malkovich plays a mob boss named Joe Black, who ends up with what seems to be the priceless lost original manuscript of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

So what exactly is “the priceless” manuscript, and why does the film treat it like a high-value asset? According to the review, the manuscript is connected to an ancient Catholic priest in Sicily with mafia connections, and that lineage matters. It turns Dante scholarship into something closer to a black market supply chain: discovery, intermediaries, and then possession by power brokers. It is not subtle. The film’s world argues that art and scripture are not just studied. They are fought over, traded, and leveraged. And because the film is “freely adapted from the Nick Tosches novel of the same name,” it also signals that this is not a history lesson so much as a stylized collision between cultural authority and criminal logistics.

This collision is why Schnabel’s “combustible mix of lowlife cynicism and high art” lands as an entertainment risk, not just a premise. The review compares the tone to a blend of Umberto Eco and George V Higgins, essentially saying: treatology meets hardboiled systems. From a business angle, that matters because it maps onto how prestige content is increasingly marketed. Big names are part of the distribution system, not only the talent stack. The cameos from Scorsese and Al Pacino function like credibility badges that tell audiences: yes, this is weird, but it’s also vetted by the high-status club.

And yet the review also undercuts the inevitability of prestige success. It calls the film “flawed but fascinating,” and it points to the key failure mode: the story “unfortunately unwinds in the end into sentimental fantasy.” That is an editorial warning label for anyone funding, producing, or commissioning genre hybrids. Audience appetite may be strong for bold blending of worlds, but narrative payoff still needs to match the tonal contract established early. If you hook people with “mysterious, scabrous and bizarre adventure” and then drift into sentimentality, you can blunt the impact of the earlier spikes. In other words, the film’s biggest strength is also the risk: it builds an argument about “sin, art and the Mephistophelean bargain” involved in “the attainment of wealth, power and knowledge,” but the ending softens that argument rather than cashing it out.

There is also a structural reason the film stays gripping even when it stumbles. The story unfolds “on two narrative levels,” which creates a reflexive loop between scholarship and authorship. Dante is both poet and a figure whose Divine Comedy “virtually invented the concept of redemption,” while Tosches is a modern writer who refuses compromise and pays for it socially and professionally. That parallel is doing heavy lifting: it suggests that the struggle for meaning is inseparable from the struggle for access. Then Joe Black, the mob boss, becomes the physical manifestation of that access problem, the one who ends up with the manuscript after it is discovered through Catholic mafia-linked channels.

For executives, investors, and creators, the second-order implication is straightforward: premium culture branding is increasingly being achieved through high-contrast juxtapositions, but the narrative has to maintain that contrast all the way through. In the Hand of Dante shows what happens when a prestige director packages cynicism, spiritual crisis, and criminal enterprise into a self-aware “jeu d’ésprit” with star density. It also shows the boundary where self-awareness stops being a feature and becomes a way to avoid consequence. Peers watching from the production side should notice the stakes embedded in that ending shift. If your early act sells a hard-edged bargain between art and power, your last act has to keep the same price, not lower it.

Schnabel’s film may be “hilarious and shocking” “at least at first,” and it may “beckon its audience over to peep into the fathomless abyss of heaven and hell,” but the review’s final verdict warns that tone is not a garnish. It is the deal. In a media world where audiences increasingly reward bold genre collisions, the real competitive edge is not just getting attention. It is delivering payoff without drifting into a different emotional category midstream.