"Red Dragon"

At the very least, though, his brand of understatement is a blessed relief next to Hopkins' coming on like a bad Bette Davis impersonator. Hopkins has had a lucky run as Hannibal Lecter. So many moviegoers seem to be enchanted and mesmerized by him, but the appeal escapes me. "The Silence of the Lambs" has been hailed as a moody masterpiece, with Hopkins' performance as its steely center. But I find the picture to be so enamoured of its own low-lit gimcrackery that I can't bring myself to take it seriously. There, as in "Red Dragon," Hopkins takes such great care to festoon his character in crepey elegance that he succeeds only in turning it into low camp. He decorates his character's brilliant, evil thoughts with buttery line readings and oh-so-knowing smirks and winks -- it's funhouse acting of the worst kind, where everything we need to know is punctuated and underlined lest we miss it. These performances aren't scary, multilayered or psychologically intense: They're the preening and mincing of an aging starlet, and Hopkins has done (and can do) much better.

The only pleasure to be had in "Red Dragon" comes from some of its smaller performances: Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a sleazy tabloid journalist, delivering all his lines sideways -- they bounce off the movie's margins instead of thudding right toward its lumbering moose of a center, as nearly everyone else's do. And Emily Watson, as a blind woman who befriends Francis, is believable even in the midst of the grandly melodramatic moments she has to play.

But Ratner -- director of the "Rush Hour" movies -- is one of those filmmakers who have to spell everything out for us, and while it's admirable that he wants to tell the story clearly, there's also something kindergartenish and unsophisticated about it. (Be sure to listen for the way Danny Elfman's score swells like a flooding fjord during the electrifying blow-job scene.) "Red Dragon" -- shot by Dante Spinotti -- has an alert crispness to it. But the look is almost too clean for the mood Ratner's going for. The movie is handsome hokum.

And to put it bluntly, nothing in "Red Dragon" justifies the movie's existence, considering that a superb adaptation of Harris' hugely popular novel already exists. Michael Mann's 1986 "Manhunter" has a goofy title and an even goofier neo-new-wave synthesizer score. But for sheer, true creepiness, it hasn't dated at all. In that movie, Brian Cox plays the true Hannibal Lecter. He's a character, not a cartoon psychopath -- when he's allowed one phone call from his prison cell to call his lawyer, he instead manages to make another, illicit call by conning the operator in a dulcet croon: "I don't have the use of my arms. Would you be so kind as to dial the number for me?" His manipulativeness is almost soothing, proper, like a cordial note on nice stationery, even though his quick-minded deviousness is immediately obvious and unsettling. This is the kind of thing a psychopathic genius would come up with -- a bit of role-playing that puts in the service of pure evil the pity and sympathy that average people are all too willing to dole out.

Ratner doesn't re-create that moment in "Red Dragon," and you wonder why -- I know Hopkins couldn't have carried it off nearly as well as Cox did, but it would have at least been interesting to see him try.

Ratner also doesn't seem to realize that nothing Ralph Fiennes does here comes even close to the sheer terror -- not to mention the weird poignancy -- of Tom Noonan, who plays the same character in "Manhunter." At one point, Noonan appears with a ladies' stocking pulled halfway down his face, its leg sprouting from his head like a stretched-out nipple and extending into a long tail that he has tucked in neatly in the back.

The stocking is never explained, and yes, the sight of it is a little funny. But you can't laugh. There is such meticulousness in the way Noonan wears that stocking; it signifies something about that character that we can never really know -- and suggests that, cool as it may seem to "identify" with a serial killer, this one has definitely gone to places we just can't go.

Noonan is disturbing not because we identify with him, or because we've been programmed to feel some textbook pity as the result of learning some horrible secret about his background. He's disturbing because we're wrenched into feeling something for him even though we know so little about him. Somehow Noonan, Cox and Mann showed us the face of psychosis, not just its mask. Fiennes, Hopkins and Ratner, on the other hand, are hung up on its multiple disguises. In their world, deranged evil comes out of the dress-up box. They leave Pandora's box untouched, never even realizing it's theirs for the opening.

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