Hannibal, dir Ridley Scott, 2001

Let's get this straight from the start: Hannibal is not so much a sequel to the Silence of the Lambs as the third part in a franchise which began with Manhunter, an adaptation of Thomas Harris's novel Red Dragon originally lensed by Michael Mann and now slated for a remake with a cameo performance from the actor who has made the part of Thomas Harris's most famous creation, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, his own, Sir Anthony Hopkins.

Like all third acts in a movie franchise, Hannibal suffers from the usual problems of overcoming familiarity, of both teasing and fulfilling audience expectations, and of reaching a satisfying conclusion yet leaving the door ajar for another episode. That it succeeds far better than, say, Alien 3 or Jaws 3-D is due to solid performances from the two principals, Ridley Scott's operatic Grand Guignol, and a script that efficiently, although at times rather drastically, simplifies Harris's original novel.

As with the novel, the film opens with Clarice Starling's fall from grace with the FBI, some years after her triumph of catching Jame Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs. Julianne Moore, grainily luminous and very slightly detached, plays Starling as world-weary, quietly desperate and boxed in by the kind of masculine prejudice exemplified by the justice department's Paul Krendler (a petulant Ray Liotta). Moore shows only flashes of the confrontational grit Jodie Foster foregrounded in the original role, but of course this isn't Starling's movie: it's Hannibal Lecter's.

Lecter is about to take up the prestigious position of curator of the Palazzo Capponi in Florence when his assumed identity of the scholarly Dr. Fell is penetrated by Rinaldo Pazzi, an Italian policeman with an expensive young wife. Pazzi, a sympathetic performance by Giancarlo Giannini, betrays Lecter to rich psychopath Mason Verger (Gary Oldman unrecognisable under prosthetics), a horribly mutilated victim of Lecter's. Verger plans to capture Lecter and feed him alive to specially bred wild pigs; Clarice Starling, about to be drummed out of the FBI after a controversial shoot-out with a gang of drug-dealers (led by Hazelle Goodman, reprising her role in TV's Homicide: Life on the Street), is drawn into Verger's spider-web as bait when Lecter sends her his condolences.

This time around, Lecter is portrayed not as Hannibal the Cannibal, a coldly calculating monster, but as a kind of Byronic anti-hero, playing Scarlatti while mooning over Starling's photograph in a scene straight of out of Phantom of the Opera (he borrows the Phantom's wide-brimmed hat, too), amoral rather than evil, killing only "the free-range rude" and those who disturb his attempt to build a sanctuary where he can quietly enjoy his ultra-refined tastes.

The attempt to kidnap Lecter in Florence goes horribly wrong. Pazzi suffers a very public and apt dispatch, and Lecter returns to America, where he schemes to rid himself of Mason's attentions while wooing Starling. Despite his imposing bulk, Hopkins infuses his role with a feline and almost gleeful menace, and allows a lovely wounded light into his gaze when he looks down upon a sleeping Starling after he breaks into her apartment. Lecter is no longer Starling's seductive, Mephistophelean tutor, but an unrequited suitor.

Thereafter, the plot is hustled along with the efficient dispatch of a public execution. After a cat-and-mouse game with Starling in an indoor fairground, using mobile phones and sound cues in a scene reminiscent of The Conversation, Lecter is captured by Verger's henchmen (does he allow himself to be captured? it isn't made clear, but we must assume that he does), turns the tables on the gloating Verger with Starling's help, and offers up Krendler as a bonding feast and a final test of Starling's rectitude in a scene involving an amniotronic double and CGI that's immediately repulsive and then, as the camera lingers too long, rather silly -- gasps were quickly followed by giggles in the preview screening. The pianissimo ending, famously embargoed by the studio, trails threads of story that could be gathered up in another episode.

With pin-sharp editing and some splendidly atmospheric lighting (most especially the blues and greys of the Florentine scenes), Hannibal moves along nicely enough. But although the disparate settings are cleverly linked, and there are some unexpected shocks (most particularly a surveillance camera sequence showing Lecter attacking a nurse in the psychiatric hospital where he was once incarcerated, something we've only heard about in the previous two films), the film lacks both the coherence and the relentless suspense of either Red Dragon or The Silence of the Lambs. Despite slasher film excesses -- bloody bowels splashing on wet cobbles, pigs ripping off a man's face, gourmet brain surgery -- this is at heart an opulently romantic film. And without the grounding of the Biblical sense of evil that permeates Harris's writing, Lecter, with his trademark lines -- ta-ta, goody-goody, okey-dokey -- threatens to become just another franchise villain, along the lines of Freddie Kreuger or even, God help us, Chuckie.

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