Though she commits fully to the role and holds her own while being belittled and scapegoated by her FBI and DOJ higher-ups (chiefly Ray Liotta as the slimy and misogynistic Paul Krendler), Moore can’t hold a candle to Jodie Foster’s nuanced portrayal of Clarice Starling. Oldman’s scenes are probably the highlight of the film – he conveys an impressive amount of malicious, spoilt rich kid entitlement through heavy prosthetics as Verger is left increasingly apoplectic by his lackeys’ inabilities to apprehend Lecter. More often than not, Hannibal’s darkly humourous edge comes from Oldman as depraved millionaire child molester Mason Verger, a man left a horribly disfigured quadriplegic by an earlier encounter with Lecter, musing to Starling that the good doctor drugging him and suggesting he cut off his own face “seemed like a good idea at the time”. Hannibal could have been relentlessly bleak, almost nihilistic in its hopelessness, but there is another juxtaposing tone, and it’s this liberal deployment of dark humour that almost rescues the film. You can’t really morally object to the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs being far more explicit – this is a story revolving around the life and times of a charismatic cannibalistic serial killer after all – but when nothing is left to the imagination, you immediately lose tension and you soon become desensitised to anything that was intended to be shocking or frightening. Far from the atmospheric psychological thriller that its predecessor was, Hannibal is a splatter movie with better than normal production values and big-name actors. Throats are slit, faces are peeled and eaten, bowels fall out of hanging bodies and brains are flambéd. Hannibal is a gruesome affair throughout and absolutely everything is put on screen for the sake of eliciting a gasp from the audience. Show and don’t tell is a common adage in filmmaking, but you don’t need to show everything. In Hannibal, Ridley Scott decided to show us the same violent assault of the nurse by Lecter in flashback, and in lurid detail, and just like that, the spell is broken. The scene in that film where Dr Chilton shows an (unseen to the audience) Polaroid to Starling with the comment, “He did this to her… the doctors managed to reset her jaw, more-or-less” has in-built power and is far more chilling than actually seeing the incident in question. One of the most effective choices in The Silence of the Lambs was what they decided not to show. Meanwhile, having escaped the asylum, Lecter is finally drawn out of hiding in Florence, Italy when a wealthy victim of his, Mason Verger (Gary Oldman), pulls strings to get Starling to resume the FBI manhunt and allow Verger an opportunity to exact his revenge. Ten years after FBI Agent Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore) hunted down serial killer Buffalo Bill with the help of incarcerated cannibal Dr Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), Starling’s position at the Bureau is threatened when she is blamed by her superiors for a very public drug raid going spectacularly wrong. But there are talented people in front of and behind the camera, and some ambitious and creative choices made, so perhaps you can chalk this one up to having to keep too many plates spinning at once. Granted, it was a tall order to follow up The Silence of the Lambsten years after it swept the Academy Awards, especially with Thomas Harris’ divisive and flawed book sequel as the basis for the screenplay. Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore, Gary Oldman, Ray Liotta, Frankie Faison, Giancarlo Giannini, Francesca Neri, Zeljko Ivanek, Hazelle Goodman Screenwriters: David Mamet, Steven Zaillian
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