Word: lecter
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...Anthony Hopkins is not affronted in Fracture. As Ted Crawford, a super-smart engineer, he's pretty much recycling the rumbling intellectual arrogance of Hannibal Lecter and he seems energetically happy in his work. This time he murders his unfaithful wife, cheerfully admits the crime and acts as his own attorney in the subsequent murder trial. There are two main plot lines in Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers' screenplay. One is that the police officer investigating the case is, in fact, the dead woman's lover, which opens the possibility of doctored evidence. The other is the cat-and-mouse...
...story is a cautionary tale, but they revel--along with the villain and the audience--in the sick grandeur of a hit man, a supervillain, a serial killer. Movies used to show what the audience wanted to be. Then Norman Bates came along, and Freddy and Jason, and Hannibal Lecter, to prove that we also wanted to see what we feared. The psycho creeps toward his victim; we can't watch, and we can't turn away...
...mean, where's the charm? There's no suggestion of the charismatic creepiness of Hopkins' Lecter - that mysterious, chatty, seductive beast so beguiling you'd immediately invite him to dinner. (But don't let him serve you.) The movie lays out the reasons this boy became that man, but without establishing a connection between the two, in looks or personality...
...this could conceivably be of interest if the movie had the dash, the wit, the silky threat of the mature Hannibal Lecter. But he's missing, as is Anthony Hopkins. So Webber takes his cue for pacing and tone from the young Hannibal. Alas. As played by Gaspard Ulliel, he's just a gawky, monosyllabic adolescent. You get hints of Hannibal's empathy - his gift at mind- and heart-reading - and the briefest pass at his fascination with culinary matters. But this Hannibal is hardly even a rough sketch for the later Lecter. Indeed, he's virtually unrecognizable...
...duty-bound to mention two moments I liked. One is the revelation of a masked ancestor statue that Lady M prays to - the older Lecter will be wearing a similar mask when we first see him in The Silence of the Lambs. The other, just preceding Hannibal's first murder, is the flash of a smile before his face goes blankly ferocious and he proceeds with his butchering. But these are two moments in two hours, and Webber has no other epiphanies to offer. As Girl With the Pearl Earring showed, his tone is contemplative; he has neither the skills...