UNCLE DON’S VIEWS OF NIL REPUTE

Half a score and not enough years ago, some producers brought forth on

the silver screen a new film conceived in greed and dedicated to the

future proposition that all things being equal, an awful but profitable

movie should beget a subsequently even more awful sequel.

Now we are engaged in suffering through a great cinematic bore,

testing whether we, the viewers (or any other viewers so dull and so

stupid) can endure through two hours.

It is fair, not to mention accurate, that “The Silence of the Lambs”

was the worst film ever to win an Academy Award, worse even than “True

Grit” or “Titanic.”

Its sequel, “Hannibal,” opens pretty cool. Bullets fly. Bodies go

splat. And our heroine -- Julianne Moore replacing Jodie Foster as

Clarice Starling -- comes out of it listed in the Guinness Book of World

Records as the FBI’s most successful female killer of bad guys.

She also had some sort of relationship with our garden-variety

cannibal, Anthony Hopkins reprising his amazing unconvincing role of

Hannibal Lecter. Who better to chase down Hannibal than Starling?

A cannibal who seems to view people as to how many quarter-pounders he

can make out of them, Lecter evidently also picks his victims to improve

society, such as chowing down on a flutist to better the Baltimore

Symphony. Wonder if he ever considered editors?

Having fled the States at the end of the last installment, Lecter has

taken up residence in some deteriorating Italian city -- Rome, Florence

or some decrepit city of eternal blight.

Chased by an Italian cop who looks, acts, and speaks like a refugee

from one of Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns, Hopkins emotes

constantly, voraciously, annoyingly and insipidly to the point where we

in the audience silently plead for some unnecessary violence to break up

the tedium.

Yo, Hopkins! I hate to break the news to you, but Lecter wasn’t scary

10 years ago, and now he’s turned into nothing more than a know-it-all,

motor-mouthed bore. You should keep your mouth shut, and go out and kill

something.

Wanna watch cannibals? Check out “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” or

“Motel Hell.” Visit Donner Pass or New Guinea, whatever.

The only person who ever survived one of Lecter’s attacks is also

chasing him. Confined to a wheelchair and ugly enough to make a freight

train take a dirt road, this clown adds one of several subplots trying to

fill in the holes of a script that must have been composed of British

beef.

Toss in your killer pigs, conspiracy nuts, reward hunters, deviates,

decrepits and doofuses, and immediately you’ve got a film that makes less

sense than the change in your pocket.

“Hannibal” is beautifully lit and framed, but then so are a lot of the

velvet Elvises hanging in some of my readers’ trailers. Hopkins tries to

glare and stare, but it instead comes off as jowls and smirks. There’s

not a single creepy scene, and we’ve all seen much scarier stuff waiting

to beeaten on a potluck banquet table.

Julianne Moore goes the tough broad route, glaring and staring, but

she really needs a few scars and some tattoos. She should break some

longnecks against her head now and then to wake the audience up and

remind us that she’s tougher than month-old tortillas.

Moore and Hopkins play a never-ending game. Like picking petals off a

daisy, she catches him, she catches him not, she catches him, she catches

him not. Blah, blah, blah.

Slower than a speeding Pinto, duller than a Ginzu knife, cheesier than

a five pound block of Velveeta, even a pardon from Clinton couldn’t have

saved “Hannibal.”

o7 “Hannibal” is rated R for strong gruesome violence, some nudity

and language.

f7

* UNCLE DON reviews b-movies and cheesy musical acts for the Daily

Pilot. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].