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Hannibal Lecter: People don't always tell you what they are thinking. They just see to it that you don't advance in life.
10 years have passed and Dr. Lecter is living under a disguise in Florence, Italy as an art scholar. Back in his home country of America agent Clarice Starling(Moore) is the center of a botched drug raid which resulted in one of the drug dealers being shot with a baby in her arms. Mason Verger (Oldman) who was the only one of Lecter’s victims to survive uses Clarice’s latest mishap as a way of getting her reassigned to the Lecter case, in hopes that this will draw Lecter out of hiding and he get exact revenge on Lecter for what happened to him.
When you think about classic movie villains you instantly think of Dr. Hannibal Lecter and his menacing appearance, you think about the riveting portrayal of Anthony Hopkins the way he sounds, the eeriness of his voice, the insanity that is 100 percent visible in his eyes. This is what you get after you watch Silence of the Lambs. Now when you think about Hannibal, you think it has his name all over it how can it be a bad film? When you think about what Silence of the Lambs did so well you can instantly see why Hannibal does not compare. Silence of the Lambs was perhaps the first truly mind numbing scary movie I have ever seen in my life, when I watched it for the first time people had to tell numerous times it was just the events of a film, I was young and I bought into that still. Now as I grow older, it becomes so real, there are people like Lecter in this world, and Anthony Hopkins just seems so poised and so ready to try and torture your mind. Silence of the Lambs was so brutal in showing us the harsh realities of Hannibal Lecter, the way he manically destroys and tortures his victims, whereas in Hannibal you could almost see how he existed normally not that he was deranged beyond belief. The timeline of 10 years is rather long if you want my opinion, a killer of this nature would not have been off the map for this long. Did they stop searching for him? What happened? Why did it take 10 years before they heard anything about him again?
The recasting of Clarice completely turned me off, Moore’s accent did nothing for me, and she seemed rather dull and flat but I didn’t expect her to match intensity with Hopkins the way Foster did in Silence of the Lambs. However Mason Verger was an interesting character, bed ridden due to injuries suffered at the hands of Lecter but not completely innocent in this whole story. Lecter was originally assigned to be Verger’s therapist because of his child molestation conviction, so the film never allows Verger to become the innocent victim. Perhaps taking Verger and making him an innocent victim of fate and circumstance would have been a much better story, how Lecter corrupted him to only want revenge, to seek torturous justice and to make Lecter feel pain as he felt it would have been a better story. But when you realize that two criminals are going to showdown you know which one is going to win, hell his name is plastered as the title of the movie.
What I disliked most however was how Lecter was always where he shouldn’t have been too long. Let me explain, he would stay at the scene of his crimes just until the cops showed up, then like the wind he was magically gone leaving Clarice and the other FBI agents wondering how he could have possibly managed an escape. Where in Silence of the lambs Lecter used disguises and pure brute force in this film he simply uses the art of timing, but there is no way we could get the timing just right every time.
Hannibal is not the sequel fans were hoping for, the 10 year gap in storyline could be to blame, perhaps it was just too difficult to duplicate the darkness of the first one, perhaps it was the change in director and the main female lead, perhaps it was a small combination of all of these things leading to what one can only describe a mediocre sequel. In the end though I think this film fails because of its inability to mess with your mind like Silence of the Lambs did; which is due in large part this film squarely focuses on Lecter as its big picture and forgets about all the tiny little background images that help make it a complete image.
6/10
