Like Hannibal Rising six years later, Hannibal was the result of Thomas Harris desperately trying to retain *some* level of creative control over the characters he'd created so Dino De Laurentiis' company couldn't just produce whatever the fuck Hannibal-related movies they wanted; Harris shat out a book and Universal shat out an adaptation of it. Even with the impressively combined talents of David Mamet and Steven Zaillian doing the adapting, the underlying story was so underwhelming that the authors of Glengarry Glen Ross and Schindler's List, respectively, couldn't salvage what little meat was on those bones.

While the writing isn't anything to write home about, this movie *does* do a lot of good things right. Jodie Foster making the wise decision to not reprise her role as Clarice Starling hurts it, but Julianne Moore in her stead helps. As do most of the other casting decisions; Gary Oldman as the mutilated Lecter victim Mason Verger was one of my first introductions to Oldman's commitment to method acting, and you could never go wrong with Ray Liotta unless you were making a shitty, low-budget mob movie after Goodfellas. Then there's Giancarlo Giannini as the corrupt Italian cop hoping to cash in on Lecter's reward.

I always forget that Hector Salamanca himself, Mark Margolis, is one of the skin cream sommeliers; he was *so* memorable as the mostly-mute, infirm Hector Salamanca on Breaking Bad that I always get a little excited when I see him in his other roles. Like in the coke-addicted pedophile-defending "friend" in Gone Baby Gone.

"Aren't you curious about why [Lecter] dines on his victims? To show his contempt for those who exasperate him." Oh, look at that, some wildly unsubtle foreshadowing. As unnecessary and disappointing as this movie and its novel was, I can't deny that I enjoy the absolute hell out of Hopkins hamming it up as the comic book supervillain version of Hannibal Lecter in these scenes between him and Giannini, especially the one where the two discuss the Pazzi family's history in Florence, and Hannibal dropping even less subtle clues about who he is, like "Let's drag these down. They must be as heavy as bodies." Gotta hand it to *Commendatore* Pazzi for how carefully he planned his attempt at getting a clean Hannibal Lecter fingerprint: hiring a known pickpocket to steal Hannibal's wallet, so Hannibal would grab the pickpocket by the wrist, where that nice, shiny wrist band would be *was* pretty clever for a guy who ***really*** didn't understand how cautiously cunning and vicious Lecter was; him and an amateur Florentine thief expecting to catch Hannibal Lecter off guard is like a pair of gazelles hunting a starving lion.

Three million USD *was* a good chunk of change in 2001, but if I knew as much about Hannibal Lecter as Inspector Pazzi did -- especially already having earned the nickname of * Il Mostro di Firenze* -- three **billion** wouldn't have been enough for me to keep risking my ~~neck~~ guts on that reward money. Ah, the "Hello, Clarice" that became the "Luke, I am your father" of this franchise; while Vader's real line was a *lot* closer to the one everyone thinks it was, Lecter's famous greeting to Clarice in The Silence of the Lambs was "Good evening, Clarice."

Brick Top's "be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm" speech from Snatch comes to life; granted, the novel this movie was adapted from was released an entire year before Snatch was released, and about four months before Snatch started filming, so it's not like this concept was a rip-off from Snatch.

And now begins the *true* disservice to both Hannibal Lecter's and Clarice Starling's characters in both the novel and this adaptation; while Hannibal's grand plan for Paul Krendler was very much in line with his earlier novels' counterpart, executing it to "win" Clarice over just felt so off-base. Sure, the story had spent the time building up to that moment to make it seem more organic than clumsy, but it was still such a clumsy conclusion for both characters; sure, Clarice was doped the fuck up and flying over the moon from the morphine, but it still just didn't gel with her character. All that said, though, despite how complicated and convoluted Hannibal's plan was for Krendler, I can't deny that it wasn't *perfectly* in keeping with his novel counterpart; feeding Krendler his *own* brain after lobotomizing him is about *the* most Hannibal Lecter move there is.

Nothing like a patriotic Fourth of July fireworks show to celebrate the Lithuania-borne cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Given the retcon of Lecter's early childhood in the Hannibal Rising novel and movie, him feeding a small child some of Krendler's brain on an airplane is even more out of character for Hannibal than the rest of this mess of a story.