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 Hannibal
by Marianne Gray  Hannibal
Lecter has started a new life in Italy where admittedly he has been
serially chomping his way through a few of the locals but at the
same time he has become a respected museum curator working in Florence.
Clarice Starling, FBI agent extraordinaire (Julianne Moore), is still
on his track but she's been targeted by a corrupt rival (Ray Liotta)
and a vengeful Lecter survivor (an uncredited Gary Oldman) as the
bait to lure out old Hannibal the cannibal (Anthony Hopkins).So far so good but an inevitable part of the problem with Hannibal, budget $87 million dollars, is that The Silence of the Lambs was an astonishing piece of entertainment. During the decade between it and our next cinematic step into the evil world of Dr Hannibal Lecter with Ridley Scott's follow up Hannibal, time has sharpened the mind and certainly my perverse curiosity about what makes Lecter tick expected a lot smarter stuff than Scott and the department of gore slushes out here. Much of the fuss about the film has been made about all the gore, tasty little dishes like the top of a man's head (Liotta's) being sawed off or a another (Oldman) being eaten by his own giant wild boars - don't mind me while I leave the cinema to hurl, please. But the real problem really lies much deeper than in the unwatchable. This is actually quite a dull film killed by the sword of amorality. The people featured are venal, the situations are vile and even the atrocious Lecter has lost his supreme and complex intelligence. Despite it being based on Thomas Harris' thrilling novel tweaked for the screen by the hugely reputable David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, Hollywood has once again shown itself unable to deal with the big themes with any kind of intellectual credibility. It isn't difficult to understand why Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme and the original Clarice Starling, Jodie Foster (who turned down a pay packet of $13 mil), chose to pass on this one. It is charmless, without morals and funny only insomuch as you have to laugh in sheer amazement that "they" thought they could get away with it. If they can change the end of Thomas Harris' book, they can get away with it, I suppose. Scott is quoted as having said 'I shall be disappointed if I hear that people aren't smiling - when they're not screaming.' Screaming or puking, Mr Scott. |
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