Review: Hannibal
I've been seriously considering eating your mother.Rating: 4 / 10
Well, I didn't like Julianne Moore before this movie, and I don't like her now. In fact I found her morosity a distraction from what little story the movie actually had.
However, normally bad actors/actresses can make up for their lack of talent with physical appeal. Julianne Moore was in Boogie Nights, and like most of the other females in that movie spent most of her time naked and indeed getting rooted by Marky "de Schlong" Mark. But Julianne Moore's appeal is purely freudian. That is, she has features only suited to a 40 year old mother of three with whom the idea of sex is startling at best.
The movie is purpose built, and that's trying to put it nicely. The whole story seems to exist purely as an excuse for the gory bits at the end, which admittedly are good enough to make up for the beginning, but still the movie lacked suspense, thrill, or anything of the sort.
Anthony Hopkins was of course brilliant given what he had to work with, and Ray Liotta did quite a reasonable job also.
But the real star of this movie was Gary Oldman. As he introduced us to his character we went through shock, sympathy, and empathy, before finally reaching disgust. Nobody else could have been quite so sickening in such an impressively subtle way.
I'm told that the book ends differently to the movie, which I thought would be good until I heard what that ending actually was. I really don't think that this story can have a satisfying end, because it didn't have a satisfying anything else. Apparently the guy that wrote this was also responsible for Silence of The Lambs, yet that movie was actually quite good in all aspects. It also seems he wrote another Hannibal Lecter story that became a movie in 1986.. So maybe he's just all Hanniballed out.
This is more evidence that the career of director Ridley Scott, which started in the glory of Alien (admittedly the least interesting of the series) and Blade Runner, and has most recently included GI Jane, Gladiator, and Hannibal, has gone down the toilet. Sure he must be making a shitload of money, but he's doing it by making genuinely ordinary films.
See it, but not until it's on video.
Yuck.
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