Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) does his strange little dance once again with Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore) in Hannibal.

I am not among the big fans of The Silence of the Lambs. From the trio films made from Thomas Harris stories featuring Hannibal Lecter, my favorite remains Michael Mann’s largely overlooked Manhunter (from the novel Red Dragon). I concurred that The Silence of the Lambs deserved the best picture Oscar in 1991, but the field was notoriously weak (Bugsy, Beauty and the Beast, JFK and The Prince of Tides were the other nominees) and shamefully didn’t include John Sayles’ City of Hope. Certainly, The Silence of the Lambs is well made, however. Anthony Hopkins’ whispering menace is effectively chilling. And I was spooked more than once by Lecter’s sudden bursts of incredible violence. The chill is gone, however, in the current Lecter outing, Ridley Scott’s Hannibal.

  Written by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, Hannibal finds Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore replacing Jodie Foster) still working as an FBI agent on the trail of various bad guys. Mysteriously, rather than treasuring her intelligence, instincts and devotion, Clarice’s bosses seem determined to drum her out of the agency for no better excuse than the plot demands it. To get back in their good graces, Clarice agrees to investigate the claims of Mason Verger (an uncredited and completely unrecognizable Gary Oldman) that he’s found the cold trail of Hannibal Lecter. Verger’s old nemesis has been in silence on the lam for a decade, and Verger wants to get Hannibal because the good doctor once induced him to peel off the flesh of his own face and feed it to his dog. An adequate motive, I guess. And though Verger is a liar, his ploy of bringing Clarice to the hunt has the effect of flushing Lecter out of hiding. A lot of gruesome developments ensue.

  Most of the narrative line here is bald contrivance. The vendetta perpetrated against Clarice by Justice Department official Paul Krendler (Ray Liotta) arises out of thin air. Clarice’s macha woman response is equally unconvincing. A sequence of events set in Florence where Lecter is pretending to be a Renaissance art expert has potential. I was most interested in the investigation of Italian police detective Rinaldo Pazzi (Giancarlo Giannini). But Pazzi’s story is abandoned too quickly amid inadequate motivation and flimsy complication.

  In the end, this movie didn’t have a single moment as scary as a half dozen in the much more sophisticated The Sixth Sense. I am reminded of an unfortunate approach to comedy that treats the scatological as intrinsically funny. It’s not. Nor is the repellant natively scary. We get a man’s intestines dangling from 30 feet in the air like a rope of sausage, a series of victims devoured by pigs and, most notoriously, a living man fed slices of his own brain. Yes, I wanted to and did turn away. But that, folks, ain’t entertainment.