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| TV,
Justin Harries,
19 February 2001 |
Rating: F5
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With travelogue come barf-fest Hannibal making them queasy in the isles, the magic box is currently spitting out the previous instalments of Harris’s psycho killer trilogy.
‘Silence’ we all know and love, a great film with a restrained atmosphere that, like that other fab slow burner ‘The Thing’, just gets better with repeated viewing. Its predecessor ‘Manhuter’ is rather more flashy, and tries harder to please, but certainly does one thing better than the other two – Hannibal Lector.
Every body loves Hopkins as the scary shrink, but I found him a wee bit camp, with a theatricality that seemed to emerge more from Hopkins the thespian than Hannibal the Sociopath. In Demme’s repressed gem he stuck out like a sore thumb, but I imagine his over ripe mincing will be just the ticket in Ridle Scotts overbaked opus.
In Manhunter Lector is played by another scary Brit, Brian Cox. Stockier, shorn of camp, and certainly a lot more direct, Cox is a merciless intellectual who seems very capable of the acts attributed to his character. Where as Hopkins stalked a faux Goth dungeon, Cox exists in a bleached white, sterile cell – a man so dangerous he has to be erased of all identify.. One of the problems of Hopkins Lector was the underlying feeling that he would never harm Clarice Starling, such gentlemanly unaction effectively castrating him. A moral Lector, even a sympathetic one? No fun at all. I want a Lector who’ll rip my head of without a nanoseconds remorse. Of course, Demme exaggerated the good guy factor by presenting us with a range of bad guys in opposition to Lector – uncouth prison guards, game playing wardens, the like. To be as pat as a psychotherapist, he is a refection of Starling, an outsider in the society he exists in. She happens to be a cop in a male dominated enforcement agency. He happens to be a cannibal in a world of people who don’t eat their own species. OK, this bizaaro twist on a Goth romance is a lot more interesting than the ‘I’m you, you’re me’ twists of Manhunter, but compared to Coxs reptilian take, Hopkins is pure Mills and Boon.
C4 - 2200 - Mon 19th
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