Terrific film - in "The Silence of the Lambs," Lecter was trapped, a locus of evil whose mind only was free to roam. Lecter on the loose is also a compelling villain, cunning, escaping from traps and slippery as an eel. A new vllain, Mason Verger (played by Gary Oldman) is a superb joining of skill and diabolical imagination. He is as twisted as Lecter, and even trapped in his palace he is a terrifying foe.
Starling is a weaker character than she was - drier, more cynical, more closed off than the young idealist we met 10 years ago. Much of the story revolves around her, and her problems within the Bureau, but the real fun is the search and chase around Lecter. A Florence detective named Rinaldo Pazzi (played by Giancarlo Giannini) suspects that a local art curator is actually Hannibal Lecter, and decides to shop him to Verger for a $3 million reward. This turns out to be a spectacularly bad idea - in SILENCE, we had fun as we learned about Starling, and here the Pazzi character is just as good.
This is a bold, gruesome film - the brain-eating scene, a man peeling off his face with a broken mirror, wild pigs specially bred to eat a man alive feet first - all of these elements from the Thomas Harris novel survive to the big screen.
Starling is a weaker character than she was - drier, more cynical, more closed off than the young idealist we met 10 years ago. Much of the story revolves around her, and her problems within the Bureau, but the real fun is the search and chase around Lecter. A Florence detective named Rinaldo Pazzi (played by Giancarlo Giannini) suspects that a local art curator is actually Hannibal Lecter, and decides to shop him to Verger for a $3 million reward. This turns out to be a spectacularly bad idea - in SILENCE, we had fun as we learned about Starling, and here the Pazzi character is just as good.
This is a bold, gruesome film - the brain-eating scene, a man peeling off his face with a broken mirror, wild pigs specially bred to eat a man alive feet first - all of these elements from the Thomas Harris novel survive to the big screen.