The Sequel Nobody Asked For 2.5/5
***This movie is rated R*** Spoilers Ahead!!!!!
After watching Silence of the Lambs and subsequently becoming obsessed, I researched online to see if there was some kind of sequel. Turns out there was. Immediately I decided to rent it off of Amazon snuggled up in my cold dark basement which was once again probably not the best environment to watch such a disturbing movie. From director Ridley Scott e:g Blade Runner, Terminator, Alien comes the slightly disappointing sequel to The Silence of the Lambs. I was mostly excited about the prospect of seeing Anthony
Hopkins as the now escaped cannibalistic, serial killer, and renowned psychiatrist; Hannibal Lecter (gourmet cannibal). The movie did not get the best reviews out of its previous successors, it received a rather low 39% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, while users gave it a positive 62%. The budget for this film was $87million and it made $351.6million at the box offices.
7 years have passed since Hannibal Lecter gruesomely escaped from confinement and he is now living in Florence under the pseudonym of “Dr. Fell.” 7 years have passed since Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore) who is now an FBI Special Agent, famously shot “Buffalo Bill.” Clarice is merely a woman living in a man’s world so to speak. After she’s blamed by her male co-associates for a botched drug raid she is publicly disgraced and contacted by one of Lecter’s surviving victims; wealthy child molester Mason Verger (Gary Oldman) who is now facially disfigured and paralyzed. Verger has a scheme to elaborately capture and kill Lecter, to seek revenge for what he did. By assigning Clarice to his case Verger hopes it will help draw Lecter out. Back in Florence Inspector Rinaldo Pazzi (Giancarlo Giannini) has recognized “Dr. Fell” from surveillance footage, looking on the FBI’s most wanted he finds a familiar someone’s face and hopes to receive Verger’s 3 million dollar offering. Paul Krendler (Ray Liotta), one of Clarice’s more hated co-associates is bribed by Verger to say that she was withholding information after she didn’t turn in letters she had received from Lecter. This leads to her suspension.
When I first saw Julianne Moore on screen as Clarice Starling instead of Jodie Foster, I was extremely disappointed. Prior to watching this film I had only seen one or two of Moore’s other films and I was not a big fan of her acting. After watching this film I found a new appreciation for her and started watching many more of her movies, a lot of them are strange and more indie-like but I found myself immersed into a new genre that I had not liked previously. Jodie Foster’s portrayal of Clarice Starling did the character justice, yet Moore’s portrayal was not at all bad, it worked for the movie as it takes place after the events of The Silence of the Lambs and Clarice is slightly older. Anthony Hopkins, per usual, is amazing in his final portrayal of our favorite gourmet cannibal. Gary Oldman e:g The Dark Knight, The Harry Potter Movies, Air Force One as Mason Verger is another story, his acting can be compared to that of Ralph Fiennes as Francis Dolarhyde in Red Dragon. I would not say that Oldman’s acting was nearly as bad as Fiennes only because he was playing a very disfigured figure who was hooked up to many different machines to speak and breathe. It was not outstanding, the scenes with him were slightly boring and some of the time you could not understand him, which once again is understandable given that he was on “machines” but most likely could have been avoided because it was a movie and in movies they have the power to make characters understandable even in dire circumstances. Perhaps it was once again his British accent that made it hard to understand or maybe he was purposely acting like that.
Director Ridley Scott stated that he believes that the underlying emotion of Hannibal is “affection.” composer Hans Zimmer believed it to be a “dark love story, centering on two people who should never be together, a modern day Romeo and Juliet.” If you are one who has read the book Hannibal you might agree or disagree with these statements. The movie exemplifies some of this towards the end which I have to admit is one of the strangest sequences of events I have seen unfold, besides the time that Will Graham got stabbed in Red Dragon, of course. Firstly, after Lecter successfully gets taken by Mason Verger’s men, Clarice for some reason or another comes to rescue him because you know she’s been suspended by the FBI and has really nothing else to do, or maybe she’s in love??? Anyway, she gets shot by one of Verger’s henchmen after getting Lecter down from this post thing that he was chained to (Verger was going to have him be eaten by man-eating hogs). In this really dramatic sequence of events, Lecter cradles her like one would cradle their true love, and he carries her out of Mason Verger’s barn room. The lighting is really dramatic, his face is shadowed and since Clarice is passed out in his arms her head is hanging down and the light reflects off of her red hair. He takes her to Paul Krendler’s lake house and stitches her wounds up (Clarice is so lucky to have a nice cannibalistic psychiatrist, medical doctor). Some amount of time passes and we’re back in Clarice’s head, she wakes up doped up on some kind of morphine and dressed in a really nice black dress and Gucci shoes, she does manage to get up shakily and walk down stairs to very, very, very slowly dial the police. Fast forwarding through the next scene because it is far too gruesome and weird to explain and we get to the moment of truth, are our favorite characters in love like a stereotypical (dark) romance movie? Depends on how you look at the next sequence of events. Clarice who is still doped up and barely able to walk tries to fight Lecter, who then slams her against a refrigerator and somehow opens then closes the door on her ponytail to hold her in place. Clarice utilizing her FBI skills handcuffs their wrists together, and this is where it gets super strangely emotional and weird. I’m not entirely sure why, but they kiss and he asks her for the key which she says she doesn’t have? Lecter then takes this giant meat cleaver knife and says “this is going to hurt a lot” and when I first saw this (spoiler) I thought that he cut off Clarice’s hand because she screams in horror but as it turns out he cut off his own hand. Now that’s true love. After what seems like an eternity the police and FBI arrive and Lecter has already escaped on a boat, the camera turns to Clarice dramatically looking in the distance. Now it is your turn to decide if these characters are in love.
All in all, this really wasn’t a bad movie in terms of acting, there was just so much going on that at times it was hard to keep track. Anthony Hopkins was amazing per usual, and Julianne Moore lived up to Clarice’s character. There are a lot of sub-stories and different points of views and I feel like the film did not exemplify these enough which is why I give it 2.5/5 stars.
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