I'm sitting here in absolute horror watching Red Dragon: I never expected it to be as good as Manhunter, not in a million years, but this is just terrible - Edward Norton was great in AHX, but he's appalling in this, weak, insipid, boring, William Petersen was fantastic, sure, but there's no excuse for a performance as embarrassing as that...I was expecting some of the secondary performances to be better, but no: the new Reba isn't as good as the old Reba, Anthony Hopkins isn't a patch on Brian Cox (even though they've expanded his part, ridiculously so in fact) and totally ruins the telephone scene, Fiennes is okay but not remotely in Tom Noonan's league, the new Lounds is horrible, Harvey Keitel is barely even there as Crawford and the less said about Graham's family, the better. It's almost mesmerising seeing a film so comprehensively inferior to its original, it feels like Michael Mann had someone on the inside to deliberately sabotage proceedings - the nearest comparison I can think of was Van Sant's remake of Psycho, but even that had the merit of adding one interesting subliminal image to leaven its awesome crappiness.
Some incomprehensible omissions for a film which is ostensibly more faithful to the novel than Manhunter, too - for some reason they don't show Graham placing his hand on Lounds in the Tattler photo (that's the entire point), and they completely eliminate all the tensions in Graham's family (again, that's kind of the point). Lecter is so up his own fundament in this film it's unbelievable: in the novels he's clearly fallible for all his brilliance and makes calculated errors at least some of the time, but in this one he's like some kind of pantomime wizard.
Even the music is off - Danny Elfman, for goodness' sake? Maybe they should have shot it as a claymation with Wallace and Gromit as crossover characters.
Some incomprehensible omissions for a film which is ostensibly more faithful to the novel than Manhunter, too - for some reason they don't show Graham placing his hand on Lounds in the Tattler photo (that's the entire point), and they completely eliminate all the tensions in Graham's family (again, that's kind of the point). Lecter is so up his own fundament in this film it's unbelievable: in the novels he's clearly fallible for all his brilliance and makes calculated errors at least some of the time, but in this one he's like some kind of pantomime wizard.
Even the music is off - Danny Elfman, for goodness' sake? Maybe they should have shot it as a claymation with Wallace and Gromit as crossover characters.