Hannibal

By EWAN McDONALD

(Herald rating: * * * )

'Fess up time: I never found Silence Of The Lambs scary. I found it ludicrous and still wonder how anyone over the age of 4 was perturbed, let alone felt the need to run from the cinema swooning, at such a laughable movie.

In the sequel to the 1991 Oscar-winner, Anthony Hopkins returns as Hannibal Lecter, the sophisticated cannibal and mass-murderer.

Jodie Foster has been replaced by Julianne Moore as Clarice Starling, the FBI trainee who was such a preposterous plot-device in the first film.
Ten years of law enforcement have left Clarice more cynical than the young idealist of Silence.

The Guinness Book of Records credits her as having killed more people than any other female FBI agent, which strikes me as a strangely public credit for a secretive service officer.

After a run-in with her boss, Clarice is exiled to a desk job but is invited back to the hunt for Lecter by the madman himself. He writes to her from Florence, where he has become a wealthy art curator (and if that's your career ambition, where better?)
Lecter is on the run from another millionaire art-junkie, Mason Verger (Gary Oldman), a recovering child molester who was once assigned to Dr Lecter for therapy.

The treatment consisted of Lecter drugging him, cutting off large areas of his face and feeding it to his dogs.
Pazzi (Giancarlo Giannini), a Florentine detective, suspects that the curator is Lecter and decides to shop him to Verger for a $3 million reward. As he ends up literally spilling his guts to Lecter, Pazzi realises it would have been a better career move to volunteer for a nice, quiet security detail at the G8 summit just down the autostrada in Genoa.

In Silence, Lecter began the movie chained seven floors underground. Only his mind was free to roam and scheme; the only way Lecter could get free was to think himself out. In Hannibal, Lecter can move about freely; he has become a predator.

Ridley Scott and his screenwriters, David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, have kept much of Thomas Harris' novel — apart from the ending, which they probably changed because the original version, involving Clarice, would almost certainly have ruled out Hannibal III.

So there is brain-eating and face-eating, just to show how far we've come in our quest for more sophisticated forms of entertainment than the Colosseum or See the Bearded Woman, though shame on anyone who dares suggest that Scott made this movie just to see how many people he could shock into a cinema.

Fans will be licking their lips to hear that director Brett Ratner (Rush Hour, The Family Man) is to direct not a sequel, but a prequel called Red Dragon, Harris' 1981 bestseller that introduced Hannibal.

That story opens with Lecter being arrested by ex-FBI agent Will Graham, a top investigator who quit the bureau after nearly becoming one of Lecter's victims.
Just to show how far we've come (once again), the new film will "incorporate elements of the book not seen" in Michael Mann's 1986 version, Manhunter. Guess who's coming to dinner?

Running time: 131 mins

Rental: Today