Red Dragon

Prequels don’t always make for the most intriguing movies in setting up a series’ original film, which in most cases has already given up some of the prequel’s most important plot points. Red Dragon begins the saga of Hannibal Lecter, the central monster of The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. On top of its prequel status, it’s a movie that’s already been made (as 1986’s Manhunter). And it’s still good. Must be something in the food.

Anthony Hopkins (looking forcibly Botoxed into an earlier age) revisits his role as Dr. Lecter, but is only the second most disturbing cannibal this time around. Francis Dolarhyde (Ralph Fiennes) makes the type of chilling on-screen entrance reserved for mentally scarred serial killers like himself and keeps it up the rest of the film with tics, strange mannerisms, physical deformities, a blind chick girlfriend—the works. The film gets rolling when Will Graham (Ed Norton) is forced to work with the now incarcerated Dr. Lecter—Lecter’s capture is shown, a part excluded from Manhunter—to catch Dolarhyde (nicknamed the Tooth Fairy), but the movie takes a good long while to build any momentum. Many of the scenes feel familiar—Lecter again fucks with FBI agents with his “riddle me this” clues—but are fortunately saved just in time by new twists and commanding performances. Phillip Seymor Hoffman does the obnoxious journalist bit to perfection, while Harvey Keitel’s Jack Crawford keeps baiting Graham into chasing Dolarhyde. Be ready for some in-jokes from the other two flicks, but hold on to your patience and Red Dragon provides that rarity in movies: an ending worth the film’s sometimes numbingly deliberate pace.