Our first view of the blood-drenched walls and carpet comes with an orchestral BONG!, and the grisly fate of the tabloid journalist, Freddy Lounds (Philip Seymour Hoffman slumming schlumpily for his big paycheck), is treated as a joke.
Ratner’s relentless close-ups are those of a schlockmeister getting in your face. Ratner apes some of Jonathan Demme’s visual strategies from Silence of the Lambs but Demme was coming from such wonderful movies as Melvin and Howard (1980) and Something Wild (1986): His close-ups of Lecter (inevitably in the middle of the screen) made for an unnerving departure from the loose frames of his usually bustling, humanist universe. As the blind woman who decides to seduce him, Emily Watson somewhat overdoes the wide-eyed thing, but her sneaky eroticism gives the picture its lone touch of mystery. When he travels to the Brooklyn Museum to eat the Blake painting that inspired his Red Dragon persona (a sequence that didn’t make it into Manhunter), he might as well be munching a burrito. Partly because of how he’s photographed and directed, his psychosis has no mythic stature. Ralph Fiennes, with his chill blue eyes and gun-metal baritone, might have made a fascinating Graham, but he has been cast as Dolarhyde. But in between you could be watching a plodding, Hollywood-studio remake of some idiosyncratic foreign classic: The beats are the same, but the eerie vibe has been lost in translation.
Tally actually improves on Harris’ climax with a nifty psychological coup and there’s a fun new prologue in which Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) presides over a grande bouffe (don’t ask what’s on the plate) before FBI profiler Will Graham (Edward Norton) arrives for a nearly fatal late-night consultation. It more or less works: Harris’ book is a landmark in its (unsavory) genre, and Ted Tally’s screenplay is maybe 95 percent faithful. This new movie, directed by Brett Ratner, recycles the same narrative, many of the same lines, and even some of the same camera set-ups, but it stubbornly refuses to haunt. The best thing about Red Dragon (Universal), the second adaptation of Thomas Harris’$2 1981 novel, is that it reminds you how scary and seminal the first adaptation-Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986)-was.
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