"Hannibal"

When "Hannibal" opens, Lecter, who escaped at the end of "Silence," has resurfaced in Florence where he is posing as a renowned classical scholar, in line for an important job as head of a library whose previous top man has disappeared. The main threat to Lecter's new identity is an Italian police detective, Pazzi (Giancarlo Giannini), determined to collect a reward for Lecter's capture. That money is being offered by deformed rich weirdo Mason Verger (an uncredited Gary Oldman, still managing to overact under layers of repugnant latex that make him look like a cross between the monkey in the Domino's Pizza ad and a rotten potato). As the sole survivor of one of Lecter's attacks, Verger is now attempting to track down the cannibal in order to exact his revenge. When he gets Lecter, he plans to keep him alive while slowly feeding him to man-eating boars. Meanwhile, back in the States, Clarice, who has been relieved of field duty pending a review of her part in a drug bust gone horribly wrong, begins to suspect Verger's plans for Lecter.

Ludicrous as the novel's developments were, Harris at least laid the narrative groundwork for each. Scott and the screenwriters ignore it. I'm damned if I can tell how Starling figures out that Krendler (Ray Liotta), the Justice Department agent out to break her, is in cahoots with Verger. Or why certified evil genius Lecter, who's been given something like a sixth sense when it comes to divining the presence of his enemies, walks right into Verger's trap. It's even stranger watching Lecter sipping wine at an outdoor cafe in Florence, carefully wiping off the goblet so as not to leave identifying fingerprints. Apparently, a serial killer whose gob has been plastered all over newspapers and television and the Internet has nothing to fear from becoming a prominent resident of a major European city, vying for a job that will make him known in international academic circles.

"Hannibal," which is very likely the worst film of this year and quite possibly the next, achieves what no movie I can recall ever even attempting: It somehow manages to be both repugnant and boring. The film doesn't hold together as either storytelling or mood piece. But the nonsensical plot, the nonexistent pacing, the utter lack of suspense, the swanky, ladled-on atmosphere of John Mathieson's cinematography (going for sensuous old-world rot and conjuring up about as much romantic ambience as the side panel of a cereal box), the waste of Julianne Moore (whose role consists largely of furrowing her brow while she gazes at crime scene photos), the low-grade camp of Anthony Hopkins' performance passing for wit -- all these things fade away to insignificance next to the genuine ugliness of the movie's violence.

What the movie shows us is disgusting enough: man-eating boars, having been lured by the tape recording of a man's dying screams, tearing the face off a rotting corpse; a pile of bloody entrails going splat on the pavement; a dog gobbling down chunks of his owner's mutilated face; a man conscious as the top of his skull is removed to expose his brain. But as Dan Seymour says to Lauren Bacall in "To Have and Have Not," it's the tone that's objectionable.

Most of us have probably laughed at things just as disgusting in the horror comedies of Stuart Gordon or the early Sam Raimi. But if you're staging scenes at the pitch of grotesquerie in "Hannibal" and they aren't out of Shakespeare or Greek tragedy, then you damn well better have some zip, some sense of play, and Scott hasn't a whiff. You dread each atrocity not because it's going to be gross (it will be), but because it will be heavy-spirited, lingered on (especially the aftermath -- we don't see Lecter putting the knife in a young man's groin, we just see the stream of blood spurting out of his jeans afterwards and hear the gurgling of blood on the soundtrack). As Jonathan Demme did in "Silence of the Lambs," Scott is making a schlock horror movie as if it were serious drama.

But where Demme's movie was, in spots, marked by a misplaced application of the director's trademark empathy (especially in trying to individualize the killer's female victims -- a big mistake; in violent thrillers, treating victims anonymously, not lingering on their ordeal, is sometimes the most humane thing you can do for both the character and the audience), Scott, not a director who has ever been bothered much by human concerns, is willing to share Lecter's contempt for just about everything. He resorts to the crude device of marking Liotta's Krendler as worthy of a place on Hannibal's menu by having him say he always "figured" Lecter for a "queer," or call Clarice a "cornpone country pussy." He's stupid enough to think he can outwit Lecter and thus, in the movie's view, entirely deserving of his fate.

We're meant to feel the same way about Giannini's Pazzi. But it backfires on Scott because Giannini gives the best performance -- the only performance -- in the movie. Watching him is a little like watching some weird version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." His baggy eyes and perpetual stubble and agitated manner mark him as the human being in a world of pods playing trick or treat.

Next Page: Lecter isn't even all that scary

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