Director: Peter Webber
Cast: Gaspard Ulliel, Gong Li, Rhys Ifans, Dominic West
Have I Seen it Before: Well, isn’t this a topic of some debate?
Did I Like It: There’s an understandable impulse when watching a bad movie to let one’s mind wander to how the movie could have been improved, or even, dare I say, fixed entirely. It’s probably an unfair point to jump off for a critique of a film. One normally never knows what forces cause a movie to take its eventual shape, and if given the opportunity to steer a production, we all might come to the same blunders, or likely come up with entirely new ones*.
Here, however? I’ve got nothing. After two episodes of Friendibals, we’ve bandied about jsut what went wrong between this film and its concurrent developed novel, but it is ultimately a thing that should not be. Even a story that would have focused on those years of Hannibal in practice in Baltimore would have been less weighed down by the need to explain and make pedestrian Lecter’s (Ulliel) evil, it still would have been a largely inert tale, unless someone like Bryan Fuller was around to truly turn the proceedings on their head. Ultimately, Harris probably should have stuck by his guns and not been baited by producer Dino de Laurientiis into re-entering the fray.
But, just as Harris’ novel is an casserole dish full of uncooked noodles, this film is made up of good elements which sadly never come close to a satisfying whole. Ulliel and Li are engaging in their role, but the former never quite channels Hopkins like he he might have. For some reason, I would have believed rumored contender Macaulay Culkin more, but again, that casting would have been a near-miss. The score Ilan Eshkeri and Shigeru Umebayashi references the motifs in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) without ever feeling slavish. The camerawork and production design is sumptuous and there are brief fits where the film feels like it is a venture into Lecter’s memory palace, which feels like was the whole point.
But it isn’t enough. I’m not sure what would have made it so.
*See for an example how after Jurassic World Dominion (2022), I don’t think we’re going to hear any more about how Colin Trevorrow’s Star Wars - Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) would be any better than the film we got.