I first saw this in the early 2k on a dvd which I own.

Revisited it recently with my kids.

In this sequel to the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, Hopkins reprises his role as Hannibal Lecter which was a blessing as the movie wud have been incomplete without Hopkins.

The movie is set ten years after the events of the previous one and it is very gory and at times a bit unpleasant.

The fate of Ray Liotta's character will give Saw movies a tough competition.

Gary Oldman is totally unrecognizable with the make up effects and his name is completely removed from the billing.

Julianne Moore looked hot in the final dress but her character's cheap shoes will be missed.

This review is actually going to aim to judge Hannibal as a film on its own merits, rather than comparing it constantly to Silence of the Lambs. On its own, Hannibal is not a bad film, in fact while heavily flawed it is a fair and better-than-average one. However, it is an example of a sequel/adaptation where it is very difficult not to compare because Silence of the Lambs is such a brilliant film and a masterpiece of its type, and there were things that that film excelled in that Hannibal came up short in in comparison.

Starting with what is good with Hannibal, the film looks great. The Italian locations are gorgeous and give a real hauntingly dreamy and macabre atmosphere. The photography and editing are also very stylish, complete with an appropriately brooding colour palette. Hans Zimmer's score is powerful stuff and adds so much to the atmosphere of the film, some of it is creepy and enough to make the heart race. It is not the overly-loud, overly-bombastic, dirge-like and one-note kind of the music that can be heard in some of Zimmer's later film scores(i.e. Man of Steel).

Ridley Scott directs with assurance and with superb technical skill, also succeeding in giving some of the Italian scenes a chillingly dark quality. For about two thirds of the film, the gore while a lot of it is handled reasonably tastefully and the action is very violent without being too gratuitous and is also pretty efficient. The script is uneven, but a good amount of it is intriguing and there is delicious black humour aplenty too, a lot of it coming from Lecter.

Again, the cast are not consistent as such, but most are fine, with the top honours going to Anthony Hopkins and Gary Oldman. Hopkins reprises his most iconic(and one of his best) role and does an impeccable job, again he is funny and creepy if occasionally going overboard which occasionally hurts the tension. Oldman is unrecognisable here thanks to some truly astounding make-up(couldn't tell it was him a lot of the time) and gives an extraordinary performance, Verger is more interesting and dimensional in the book where it was much easier to feel sympathy for him, but Oldman's interpretation is truly loathsome while giving a touch of campiness and affecting dimension. Frankie Faison is charming, and Giancarlo Gianini is great as the film's most rootable character.

Julianne Moore disappoints however, she had the daunting task of replacing Jodie Foster(big shoes to fill) and does bravely. What really worked against Moore was the rather flat way Starling is written here when the writers could have embraced the opportunity to expand the character from the much more interesting way she was written in The Silence of the Lambs. Moore is a very good actress, but was rather bland here. Ray Liotta also felt out of place, a little annoying and sometimes he didn't seem to know what he was doing.

More disappointing was that what worked so phenomenally in Silence of the Lambs came up well short here in Hannibal. The story starts off very engagingly and compellingly, and the Italian scenes fare very favourably with some really entertaining bits, but once back in the United States gets somewhat convoluted as a result of trying to do too many things at once and too weird and dark for its own good, especially in the third act. It does fall short on suspense and mystery while the chilling psychological resonance that was one of Silence of the Lambs' high points is missing. If some of the scripting didn't get as heavy-handed as it tended to, if the pacing(which was at times very ponderous) was tighter, if there was more chemistry between Hopkins and Moore and if some of the second half was less ridiculous, this would have probably been at least halfway solved.

The characters could have been better written and developed, the most interesting character is Verger(and there is much more to him in the book with his sister Margot) and Pazzi the most sympathetic, other than that Starling and Lecter's personalities and characters could have been expanded upon(something I think should have happened seeing as it's a sequel) and the rest of the characters are bland stereotypes. The ending is also a let-down, far too over-the-top and even those with strong stomachs when watching films might find themselves repulsed.

Overall, problematic and vastly inferior follow-up, but has several good qualities and isn't that bad. Just that it should have been much more considering the potential, source material and talent. 5.5/10 Bethany Cox

This follow-up to SILENCE OF THE LAMBS seems to be an either love it or hate it film. I'm sad to say that I fall into the latter camp, as while I found some of HANNIBAL moderately entertaining, as a whole I found it to be too long and too uninteresting to get excited about. I'll make it clear from the start that I've never read any of Thomas Harris' books so I can't comment on the link to them...

Director Ridley Scott - now a hot property once again thanks to the success of GLADIATOR - injects his film with some lovely photography of the city of Florence, plus some impressively stylish scenes of action such as the opening shoot-out, which has to be one of the most realistic I've ever seen; in the cinema you can almost feel the bullets whizzing past you as the gunshots explode from the speakers and gravel flies into the air on screen. After this great start, not much seems to happen for a long time, which was my first inkling that something was wrong with this movie.

When Lecter finally makes his screen appearance after what seems like an age, we find he's taken up a new job as a museum curator and seems to be a happy, law-abiding citizen. His only crime is to stab a would-be pickpocket in the crotch with a knife in a confrontation on the street, but otherwise he's just a normal-looking guy. Only when Lecter is cornered by policeman Pazzi and the employees of Mason Verger does he turn nasty - very nasty indeed.

After lots more talk and plot development (so much goes on to make this film feel like an epic) we come to the a series of extra-gory scenes. The impressive use of CGI here is very good indeed, and highly realistic, making for some unforgettable images; it's a shame that the effects go far beyond the boundaries of taste and become mere gross-out moments. Otherwise, HANNIBAL's generally disappointing. Hopkins seems to relish his return to the role of Lecter, and manages to be scary in a couple of instances, and is the best actor in the movie. Julianne Moore, though, isn't really given that much material to work with and fails to be very expressive at all as Agent Starling; she seems to keep the same blank expression on her face throughout while delivering all of her lines in exactly the same way which makes her character seem emotion-free. In fact, I would go so far as to say that she's bad, a surprise as previously she's been impressive in her movies. Gary Oldman lets his makeup do the acting, but gives a great lisping voice to his character of the crippled Verger. Liotta is his usual snarling self; enough said. One more actor of note is the Italian old-timer Giancarlo Giannini, who really inhabits his crumpled detective Pazzi and makes him a fleshed-out, likable and believable character so that his death is all the more disturbing.

There's something wrong with this movie that I can't quite pinpoint. It may be the dialogue, which somehow doesn't ring true, and sounds like it's been written down on paper instead of spoken out loud by real characters. Whatever it is, I felt myself coldly detached for the entire film so that I couldn't get excited about anything that happened, really. Although it only lasts for two and a quarter hours as well, those hours seem to last an age with the pace dawdling between action. Although the gore is plentiful, there are only a couple of minor jolts to be had, so on the scare-factor level this just isn't in the same league as MANHUNTER (thinking about that guy with the stocking over his head still makes my blood run cold) or SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. In fact it seems more like a comic-book strip with Hopkins as the lovable anti-hero who only attacks when provoked. Nobody else really matters. Altogether, HANNIBAL is a movie that leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth and is no fun to watch in my mind.