The cast of “Red Dragon,” the third and (one prays) final installment of the Hannibal Lecter series, includes not only Anthony Hopkins as the famous psychiatrist-turned-cannibal, but also Edward Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Harvey Keitel, Emily Watson and Philip Seymour Hoffman – a group of actors so prestigious, their appearance in this film almost seems like a put-on.
Adapted from the first of Thomas Harris’ Lecter novels, “Red Dragon” takes place prior to events in “The Silence of the Lambs,” beginning with the capture of Lecter at the hands of a young FBI agent named Will Graham (Norton). Inevitably, the agent must return to the monster for help in dissecting the motives and methods of a new serial killer (Fiennes) who enjoys removing his victims’ eyes after bludgeoning them to death.
While this echoes the exceptional premise that made “Lambs” a modern classic and turned Hopkins into a star at age 54, “Red Dragon” feels radically off-kilter from the first reel to the last.
For starters, the scenes between Norton and Hopkins don’t work. A madman with erudite standards, Lecter’s mystique has always been rooted in our knowledge that he’s the smartest person in the movie. The ways in which he toys with and condescends to cops, captors and victims alike is great fun. In “Red Dragon,” however, this dynamic is threatened by the fact that Norton’s character was the one who stuck him in his trademark Plexiglas cage.
As such, Graham has the psychological upper-hand, and Lecter seems to know it. This needn’t have been a setback to the film, but Norton has no credibility in the role of a federal agent. The actor plays Graham as though he were a child pretending to be a grown-up. He sports a dopey expression, walks with a slouch, and in wide shots where the gangly actor shares the screen with Hopkins, their characters look more like Mutt and Jeff than a pair of worthy adversaries engaged in a tangle of wits.
The plot is equally uninspired. Even last year’s “Hannibal,” a schlock-fest met with almost unanimously negative reviews, had a certain eccentricity that made the film fun. “Red Dragon,” by contrast, is inundated with some of the most perfunctory thriller clichés – the worst being the film’s tendency to place women and children characters in danger, spare them a cruel fate, and endanger them again.
The serial killer Graham tries to hunt down is himself a hodgepodge of stock characteristics: he has an inferiority complex, mother issues, body issues and so forth. Despite the limitations screenwriter Ted Tally imposes on the character, Fiennes gives the film’s most nuanced performance in the role. Scenes between him and Watson, who plays a blind co-worker with whom the killer becomes closely acquainted, are oddly sensitive and compelling.
But these seem like moments out of a different picture. In fact, director Brett Ratner (“Rush Hour”) never establishes a consistent tone that allows us to feel as though the movie’s many episodes of violence and police procedure are anything but arbitrarily related.
Part of the problem is the success of the series itself. Now that the Hannibal Lecter pictures have become a true franchise, every actor, director and screenwriter in Hollywood seems to want to participate in the next one. All of this cinematic inbreeding has resulted in a glaring tonal inconsistency over the course of the series. Likewise, because of the large number of major actors who signed on to do “Red Dragon,” the film seems to stretch in too many directions to accommodate them.
The picture lacks a center. Producers and fans looking to Hopkins to be that central element were misguided, and it’s obvious why. For all the evil glamour of his character, it’s FBI agent Clarice Starling who anchors the story of Hannibal Lecter on a moral level. In “Lambs,” we see the horror through her clear-eyed gaze, and it is her sensibility that we miss in “Red Dragon.”
During the casting of “Hannibal,” Jodie Foster chose not to reprise the Starling role, effectively giving up on the Lecter series while she was ahead. It’s a shame the rest of Hollywood didn’t follow her lead.
Jordan Gentile is a senior in journalism. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
