Very weak... Hannibal is just a bad movie which would never have gotten any attention if it hadn't been the sequel to the excellent Silence of the Lambs... OK, maybe it had three high-caliber actors and one excellent director which had just done one of 2000's most popular movie(Gladiator), but let's set things straight... Gary Oldman is an incredibly talented actor but in this movie, he is not playing a role. The make-up he has is the only thing he is... It does the job for him. All he has to do is sit there and talk with so much make-up on his face it is impossible for him to be normal, so his job is easy. Any actor could have done what he has done in this movie... Good gross make-up, though... Julianne Moore too, can be very good, as she as proved in Magnolia, but in Hannibal, she reminds us that she can also be bad just like she was in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. As for Anthony Hopkins, he is still a great actor and Hannibal Lecter is such a great character that it is hard for him to do a bad job, and he doesn't do that. Lecter is still the attractive/disgusting character we know and love but the script he has makes it impossible for him to be half as good as he was in Silence of the Lambs. Hannibal is now a wise one-liner machine instead of the complex character he once was... And if you still consider Ray Liotta a major actor, this movie should convince you that he doesn't deserve respect. Last but not least, Ridley Scott, the director, even if he still knows how to play with lights and shadows(see Blade Runner for the ultimate proof of that), can't save this film from it's incredibly poor script. The movie starts with a cheap action sequence that seems to have as only use to fill our craving for action since absolutely nothing will happen for the next hour and a half... This script is actually the ultimate "What should not be done in a thriller". It seems David Mamet convinced himself that if nothing happens in this movie, maybe he could make it become one of those intelligent thrillers he usually writes(Mission: Impossible, The Spanish Prisonner)... For a thriller to be intelligent, it needs to be thrilling as well as complex and needs solid characters. None of the characters in this movie are almost believable. For example, how could a dumb macho cop such as Ray Liotta's character get such an important job in the FBI? This movie is about as thrilling as a race between five-hundred frozen shrimps... When I say nothing happens during most of the movie, it means NOTHING happens. Clarisse, which has become annoying has hell since the last time we saw her, looks at pictures. Hannibal makes cheap jokes while a cop almost makes something happen while ALMOST trying to catch him(his fate is clear from the moment you see his face). Then, in the last 30 minutes of the movie, everything happens fast and you have trouble understanding what his happening before finally, you understand at the end of the movie that there wasn't much that happened. What you get is the feeling that Hannibal Lecter isn't as fun as he used to be, Clarisse is now an annoying FBI agent and Gary Oldman should exploit his talents instead of putting them under a mask. And the "extreme gore" I was supposed to find was much more tame than I expected it to be. Every scene which should have been tense and gut-wrenching was diluted with cheap humor, even THAT scene at the end, which wasn't that terrible nor intense. The script is mediocre and only Hopkins and Scott seem to be trying to make things better. Hopkins is still good as Hannibal, though he is less intense(mostly because of the script) and Scott directs very well this movie. Another quality of the movie is it's excellent musical score... The rest is just trash...
44%
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