Flak Magazine: Review of Red Dragon, 10-4-02

Red Dragon is the third film featuring Anthony Hopkins as achingly polite serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Predating The Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon follows the Silence mold of throwing an FBI profiler up against the brilliant Lecter in the hunt for a serial killer — this time, it's Will Graham (Ed Norton), the one who caught Lecter in the first place, now searching for a man who's killed two families in different cities in a month (Francis Dolarhyde, played by Ralph Fiennes). The screenplay, by Silence's Ted Tally, is taken from Thomas Harris' book of the same name, which was memorably adapted by Michael Mann in 1986 as Manhunter. If you come at Red Dragon knowing the plot points from its earlier incarnation, or remembering the timbre and character definition of Silence or Hannibal, or frankly having ever seen a Hollywood thriller, the movie will come off as deeply familiar.

Of course, that's another way of saying "deeply comfortable," which is a much-stressed virtue in franchise films. That's why Brett Ratner was an inspired choice to direct Red Dragon. An astute industry columnist, upon considering Ratner's taste in projects — the Rush Hour films, Nothing to Lose and The Family Man — theorizes "that he wants to be the Richard Donner of his generation." It's a salient observation, and although the author didn't mean it this way, it's spot-on faint-praise damning; much like Ratner, Donner — whose last five movies were Conspiracy Theory, Assassins, Maverick and the last two Lethal Weapons — is an excellent choice when you want a movie to be "good" in the blandest, most crowd-pleasing sense of the term.

And so it is with Red Dragon. When the killer crumples under a portrait of his stern grandmother, or says to a love interest "I have no pity," followed by a thunderclap … what can you say? Ratner is shamelessly cavalier about giving the audience what it wants, so long as what the audience wants is a jumble of canned stimuli. The best/worst example is the film's long, long ending; once Graham comprehends the element that links Dolarhyde to the two families, the movie moves through the conventional thrill-machine motions like it's got its pant leg stuck in the gears (and with pacing to match). Non-spoiler considerations prevent me from saying too much, but suffice it to say that everything that you might expect to happen happens, including impossible foresight on the part of the killer, a big fireball and a sailboat ending (which should be spoken in the same voice that Jack Black uses when saying "a Cosby sweater").

There's no benefit in (or need for) smearing Red Dragon sheerly out of preference for Manhunter, although a number of critics are doing just that, as Mann (The Insider) is much more of a critics' darling than Ratner. That said, you can learn a lot about what a movie does well or poorly when you can make directly relevant scene-by-scene comparisons, and few movies offer scenes with so many chances for legitimate comparison as these two. For instance: In both movies, Dolarhyde takes the object of his affection, Reba, who is blind, to a vet so she can have the tactile experience of stroking an anesthetized tiger. In both films, it's clear that Dolarhyde's feelings for Reba might be the human connection he needs to get him off the psycho killer tip, and so while the metaphor of Reba soothing the slumbering tiger is pretty plain, the smart play is to point up the tiger's feral nature — a sleeping dragon. Manhunter succeeds here by getting the camera in close, showing us the individual hairs that Reba is displacing as she rubs, culminating in her feeling around the tiger's gumline and exposing the tiger's (read: Dolarhyde's) fangs, feeling its hot breath on her forearm and hugging the tiger to hear its heart. In Red Dragon, we only see the whole tiger once; for the rest of the scene, we simply see Reba's hand moving back and forth along the tiger's midsection, culminating in the vet letting her listen to the tiger's (read: Dolarhyde's) heart through a stethoscope. In the first case: menace and eroticism. In the second: sappiness. And while choosing one effect over the other is clearly a director's prerogative, one is plainly superior. Whether Ratner chose to downplay the metaphor, or simply failed to pull it off, you can't say. But the difference is telling.

And then there's Lecter. Brian Cox was a pitch-perfect Lecter in Manhunter (well, technically, he played "Lecktor"), but Hopkins' much different portayal of the gentle fiend rivals him note for note — and, moreover, Hopkins' gallows-humor performance is the series' acknowledged lifeblood, and so he shows up in Red Dragon a lot — more often that he should, really — usually with some awful pun, perfectly delivered. (Every Lecter line got laughs from the college crowd I saw it with, as opposed to the chilly fear his nonchalance communicated in Silence, when the shtick was not yet a shtick.) Ratner and Tally, knowing Hopkins is who the audience has shown up for, contrive all kinds of scenarios to eke out a little more cannibal time, including an extended penultimate appearance that is totally plot-irrelevant (we watch Lecter indulge in the luxury of a payment for assistance he never gives — quid pro quo, indeed). And the movie's last shot is a naked pander-fest in which few serious directors would have indulged.

Hopkins aside, all of Red Dragon's actors acquit themselves in the most pejorative sense of that term, with only Fiennes really bringing any spark to the film. Of all the Lecter films, it's this one that really stresses the question of why its killer is the way he is, and so Fiennes has to put up with a lot of scenes that would be groaners even in one of the notoriously déclassé Psycho sequels. But in return, he's allowed to invest a childlikeness and (perhaps unintentional) humor in Dolarhyde that makes the part his own in a way that is equivalent to but totally separate from Tom Noonan's Manhunter doppelganger.

Sadly, the same can't be said for Norton. Like Mann's Heat, The Insider or Ali, Manhunter is a piece of macho opera — the police procedural as religious ceremony. This provides a framework that made the monologues of that film's Graham ("CSI's" William Peterson) work as a kind of holy fervor. But instead of angsty, Ratner makes Graham mousy, and while Norton carries off this directive with characteristic aplomb, it makes the film less propulsive, revealing Graham's frequent crime-scene monologues as the naked blocks of exposition they are. In addition, Norton bears the worst brunt of Ratner's tempo issues, starting in the first post-credits scene; when Graham's roped into taking on the Dolarhyde case over the concerns of his family for his physical and mental well-being, the film never really sells us on the toughness of the choice. This consistent lack of definition — another example is Graham's weak first confrontation with tabloid reporter Freddy Lounds (Philip Seymour Hoffman) — is lethal.

Red Dragon's sins are not of commission but omission; not what it does wrong, but what it just plain fails to do. It's resolutely average and, worse, unambitious, so bloody competent that it is in fact bloodless, cleanly avoiding opportunities to take its scenario someplace interesting, frustrating any attempts to get really caught up in it. But those qualities befit a movie that's both a third sequel and a remake; no doubt its focus-group scores were through the roof.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)