Hannibal Serves Dish of Gore

Ten years ago, the psychological thriller "Silence of the Lambs" awed audiences. Ten years later, the inevitable happened — filmmakers cashed in on a box-office hit and made a low-rate sequel.

Directed by Ridley Scott (Gladiator), Hannibal is an up-to-date film about everyone's favorite killer, Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter.

Silence was a horror film whose goriness was warranted by the gritty nature of the psychological drama at hand. On-screen violence was not abundant; it was mostly the ideas that were unpleasant.

On the other hand, Hannibal has no psychology. It is a horror film that puts all the gore it has to offer right on screen, leaving little to the imagination.

People don't just get stabbed and die; they have spurting wounds that leave puddles of blood. Characters don't have motivations or intriguing back-stories; they just do stuff amid horrid puddles of acting.

The film begins with a cliché, action-film shootout in Washington, D.C., where FBI Agent Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore, (Magnolia) is in the middle of a botched drug bust. Little to say, this has nothing to do with the movie. Because of her reckless behavior and newly acquired information from Mason Verger (Gary Oldman, uncredited) on the location of Lecter, Starling is re-assigned. She is even cordially invited back to the chase by Lecter himself, who is coming out of retirement in Florence.

Verger is Lecter's only surviving victim. He is a child molester who was assigned to Lecter for help. Hannibal drugged him up and suggested he cut up his face and feed it to his dogs. A now faceless and grisly aging man, he states: "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

Meanwhile, Lecter is in Italy, posing as a museum curator. A local cop named Rinaldo Pazzi (Giancarlo Giannini) learns who he is — and, most importantly, that there's a huge reward for his capture. Giannini steals the first hour from Moore, providing a much more interesting and exciting story until Lecter discovers his secret. You can guess the rest.

Hannibal has virtually no good interaction between Clarice and Hannibal, which means that it's missing the brilliance that made Silence so eerie and intriguing. While Hopkins plays Hannibal with the same charming wit as in its preceding film, Moore is completely unsatisfying as Clarice Starling, playing the "white trash" Secret Agent much too harder than would be imagined.

After Foster rejected a comeback after a look at the script, Moore took the helm. The interaction provides little psychological suspense because the screenplay allows Hannibal and Clarice no quality time together.

Hannibal's protectiveness and creepy respect for Clarice are played up, while her character is reduced to almost nothing.

The ending of Thomas Harris' book, disliked by many, has been resourcefully altered. We can guess that another sequel is in the offing, suggested by Clarice with her line about Lecter, "He's always with me. Like a bad habit."

Respectfully, this is a habit we could afford to break.

2 1/2 out of 5 stars