This may not be the best film out this week, but it is the one that is shouting loudest. Who doesn’t want to see Anthony Hopkins return to the role of Hannibal the Cannibal after several years of haggling over his fee, which includes an agreement to make one more film featuring everyone’s favourite cultured cannibal?
Hannibal’s plot sees Hopkins’s Dr Lecter returning to the USA, having been lured back from Italy by an elaborate hoax cooked up by Mason Verger (Gary Oldman), a former victim of Lecter’s, who has survived a fiendish munching and is now using Agent Clarice Starling as bait to get payback.
The plot is familiar cat v mouse stuff, but the big question is what sort of sequel do we have here – the useful continuation of a story that left us all dangling last time out, or something that’s been contrived by the back office?
Hopkins, one of the world’s most compelling screen presences, gives a strong hint early on, megaphoning in a performance of utter self-parody, suggesting that this is a smash-and-grab job. Everyone else follows suit with the overacting, there being no such thing as the Silence of the Hams. Indeed Gary Oldman’s performances is so ridiculous that he’s taken out an insurance policy – he’s disguised beyond recognisability. And taking over from the very wise Jodie Foster as Clarice-s-s-s-s is Julianne Moore, who is required via facial gesture to suggest that she is simultaneously attracted to and disgusted by a man who eats people.
In the director’s chair, Ridley Scott has nothing new to say and so instead lays on all the clichés he can remember from his days directing adverts – slo-mo fans, rooms full of mist, cars gracefully swooshing across bridges.
On the upside, it does all look pretty nice thanks to DP John Mathieson, particularly in Italy where the Florentine plazas and likes of Giancarlo Giannini and Francesca Neri remind us how timelessly cool Italy is. And butchery fans will be delighted with the variety of viscera, organs and offal on offer, all of it served up with an insouciant grin and a raised eyebrow. Ray Liotta, ooh dear. I’ll say no more.
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© Steve Morrissey 2001