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The Violence Of The Hams., 26 December 2003

Author: dunmore_ego from Los Angeles, California

WARNING: Spoilers flow like Chianti.

I have seen The Exorcist, I have seen The Omen, I have seen The Sixth Sense, I have seen the face of Death in Bergman's Seventh Seal - yet I was still unprepared for the bone-chilling horror I experienced in Hannibal, watching Julianne Moore's acting. Julianne Moore played Jodie Foster, while Anthony Hopkins played a psycho butler. (No really, my brain hurts...)

Ridley Scott, the creative director who helmed Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator, fell asleep during production and let a monkey take over.

Julianne Moore should publicly apologize to everyone who saw Hannibal and wash Jodie Foster's car for a year.

Jodie - I don't blame you for turning this role down, honey! Seeing this revamped version of her character, we realize that gone is the complex fledgling FBI agent we empathized with in Silence, to be replaced by a domineering, emasculating cyborg - Clarice Starling has morphed into RIPLEY! (No small blame aimed at this particular director!) - which accounts for Moore's pants, at least. (And lest we forget, it was Ridley Scott who also embarrassed us with G.I. Jane in 1997.) Granted, the passage of a decade would see changes wrought in any character, but Starling's 'character' is missing in action in this movie, replaced by a stock sheaf of clichés and woman-empowering rhetoric. The film-makers have gone and done what the Highlander poofs did: compromised everything that came before, by everything that comes after. They even re-wrote the film ending in a vain attempt to draw Jodie out, but she made a correct decision in staying away, as the re-worked film ending is even stupider than the book's ending.

Ray Liotta phoned it in. Maybe it was the fact that Lecter was ultimately going to slice open the top of his skull to eat his brain, which prompted Hair & Makeup to neglect giving him a decent HAIRSTYLE for this movie.

Scott Glenn - where are you?

Thomas Harris, author of Hannibal, the followup book to Silence Of The Lambs, perpetrated the same sin that Michael Crichton committed in his Jurassic epoch - wrote the same book with a bigger bank account. Oh, he also put in some crazy unbalanced rubbish because.. well, because people were expecting him to put in some crazy unbalanced rubbish. Like the book, from which the movie-makers drew about 50% of their storyline, the film is. *predictably* gruesome. Evisceration? Coming right up. Biting people's faces off? - you betcha! Blood spurting from severed arteries as if from a fire hose? Oooo!, sign me up for that! Whereas Jonathan Demme's taut psycho-thriller, The Silence Of The Lambs, took us on a seat-gripping psychological foray into the masterfully manipulative mind of Hannibal Lecter, suddenly we end up in Friday The 13th: The Hannibal Years - a slasher film for the faux-cerebral.

The Saviors of Hannibal: the eponymous anti-hero himself, the droll, dread Anthony Hopkins (Violent Ham No.1) and that delectable chameleon of cinematic cheesedom, Gary Oldman (Violent Ham No.2), playing Mason Verger, a disfigured previous victim of Hannibal's. Even with substandard directorial cohesion, weak dialog and Julianne Moore, some actors just can't be stultified: any words in the mouth of the artisan Oldman turn to sweet, sweet, insane love-juice, whilst Hopkins savors each syllable like his now-infamous Chianti, deploying weight and depth by merely inflecting his voice, as other actors need to achieve these same standards of craft by screaming, shooting or taking off their clothes; as some insecure directors need to achieve this same level of impact by spending $40 million on computer-generated effects which waste everyone's time and are irrelevant to the storyline, George.

As in any Hollywood sequel trying to secure the widest, dumbest demographic, punches were pulled all over the place: The film completely ignored Mason Verger's penchant for drinking the tears of children that he taunted into weeping. Even Eric Cartman went further than Ridley Scott, licking the tears of misery from Scott Tenorman's face after he tricked him into eating his parents in a chili con-carnival.

In the book, Lecter and Starling sit down to a luxurious supping on detective Krendler's brain, not simply one piece fed to Krendler. Though that was the best scene in the movie by far, it wasn't nearly enough to make me vomit more than once.

Rather than regarding Hannibal Lecter as the psychopathic murdering swine that society would be apt to regard him as, the movie LEANS on the viewing audience to regard him as the 'hero' ('anti-hero' is merely a euphemism to assuage your consciences).

At film's end (again, in a wayward departure from the book), Lecter cuts off his OWN hand rather than Starling's, to escape the 'arm' of the law (- couldn't... resist). So we are shown that, though Lecter is a calculating, psychopathic, pan-sexual, cannibalistic butcher, he still has a heart of gold when it comes to his unrequited lady love - well, ain't that precious?

After all the hype surrounding the 'long-awaited' sequel - snicker - the throaty-voiced hype, as always, far outweighed the quality of the belated, bloated product.

In a more concise interpretation of the above discourse: Eat me!

(Movie Maniacs, read this unabridged review at: www.poffysmoviemania.com/Hannibal.html)

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