Bret Ratner's Hacky Adaptation of Thomas Harris' Red Dragon Just Makes Michael Mann's Adaptation of the Same Novel Seem Even Better
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When I rewatch a movie for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0, the column that allows YOU to force me to watch a movie, television show, book, or album in exchange for an exceedingly modest amount of money, I always wonder if my opinion will change.
That’s the magic of movies: we get older, they stay the same, unless they’re George Lucas movies, and their creator fusses with them endlessly in ways that irritate his biggest fans.
In the twenty-three years since I reviewed Red Dragon for The A.V. Club, life has humbled me. Then it humbled me some more. When I thought I was in the clear, life continued to humble me.
At a certain point, I threw my hands up and implored, “You can stop humbling at some point, God! I get it! I’m not that great. You can un-humble now! I’ve learned my lesson over and over again!”
Red Dragon has not changed, unfortunately, but the reputation of its director has.
When I was head writer for The A.V. Club, I had the surreal privilege of interviewing Bret Ratner and Chris Tucker for one of the Rush Hour movies.
At one point, I asked if Tucker thought that George Clooney had stolen his idea of helping Africa, and he replied, non-jokingly, that he had. Tucker saw himself as a trailblazer and a pioneer.
Tucker, Bill Clinton, and Kevin Spacey flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane, known as the Lolita Express, to Africa to promote HIV/AIDS for the Clinton Foundation.
Incidentally, a lot of Trump supporters have deluded themselves into thinking that Democrats don’t want the Epstein List released because of Bill Clinton’s gross friendship with the prolific sex trafficker.
That’s not true! We fucking hate Bill Clinton. The dude’s a major creep. It doesn’t matter that he’s a Democrat: he deserves to be punished for his crimes and transgressions just as much as Trump does.
Since Red Dragon’s release, Ratner went from being a powerful, connected hack to being a hack who was cancelled for teaming up with mentor Russell Simmons for sex crimes to being a hack who was un-cancelled during the great Un-Cancelling that followed Trump’s creepy comeback.
Ratner directed a documentary about Melania Trump, arguably the most boring person in history, which Amazon paid $40 million for, in what can only be seen as a bribe designed to curry favor with the nakedly transactional Trump administration.
Incidentally, “naked and transactional” is a good description for Melania Trump at the beginning of her relationship with her current husband.
I've changed. The world has changed. Bret Ratner’s reputation has changed, but Red Dragon continues to suck.
I fuzzily remembered Red Dragon being mediocre and misguided. A second viewing made that take seem impossibly generous.
Acting and filmmaking are largely a matter of choices. Red Dragon makes the wrong choice pretty much every time.
Ratner’s mistakes begin with bringing Anthony Hopkins back as Hannibal Lecter, following his iconic performance that won him an Academy Award for Best Actor and catapulted the actor to international superstardom.
In Manhunter, an infinitely better take on the same novel, Michael Mann purposefully limited Brian Cox’s screentime as Hannibal Lecktor (as the character is inexplicably and frustratingly credited in Mann’s masterpiece) because he knew that he would dominate the film if given a chance. Mann wanted Manhunter to be about obsessive profiler Will Graham (William Peterson) rather than Donald Trump’s favorite cannibal.
Incidentally, I learned that Hannibal Lecter is no longer with us when Donald Trump kept referring to him as “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
I hope that the pop icon's death was painless and swift and that his family is okay.
Mann understood that when it comes to Hannibal Lecter, less is more. Ratner, in sharp contrast, thinks more is always more. He’s wrong.
Manhunter never allowed us to get bored with the erudite cannibal. Red Dragon gives us ample opportunity to tire of Hopkins and his hammy shtick. Hopkins brings a Bugs Bunny quality to the role, a mischievousness that screams, “Ain’t I a stinker?”
Red Dragon opens with an event only referenced in Manhunter: Hannibal’s capture and Will’s brush with death.
We’re introduced to Hannibal in his element, hosting a fancy dinner party for the effete elite, before Edward Norton’s Will Graham visits him to discuss a serial killer he’s been investigating.
The dogged FBI agent quickly realizes that Lecter is the guilty party upon discovering an incriminating recipe for eating humans in his home. Incidentally, they missed a real opportunity by not titling the cookbook To Serve Man.
Hannibal stabs Will. Will stabs him back before shooting him as well. Hannibal is found not guilty by reason of insanity before developing a strange work relationship with the man who hunted him down.
Edward Norton is a better actor than William Peterson, but a much worse choice for Will Graham. Peterson brought a pummeling intensity to a role, a single-minded obsessiveness that suited someone willing to risk his death and the death of his family to keep a monster from murdering again and again and again.
Peterson brought to Manhunter the same urgency he brought to the lead role in To Live and Die in L.A.
Norton brings an incongruous and inappropriate gentleness to the part of an FBI profiler as brilliant as he is obsessive. There’s no urgency to his performance. Bringing the serial killer known as Tooth Fairy to justice seems to be just another job for him, rather than a sacred crusade.
Hannibal insists that the reason Will was able to capture someone much more intelligent than him is because they are fundamentally the same.
In my write-up of Manhunter, I noted that an exchange like that could easily come across as clichéd and tired in a lesser film. Red Dragon is a lesser film, and the exchange feels corny and overly familiar. In that respect, it’s like the film as a whole.
Like Manhunter, Red Dragon takes a long time to introduce Francis Dollarhyde/The Tooth Fairy (Ralph Fiennes). Unlike Manhunter, we immediately tire of a one-dimensional lunatic whose insanity is apparent to anyone who spends more than a minute or two with him.
Francis is introduced, angrily lifting weights with pantyhose over his head, while offscreen we hear the character’s presumably long-dead grandmother hurl insults at her emasculated grandchild.
She insults his sexuality and his manhood in myriad ways. Academy Award winner Ellen Burstyn voiced the grandmother, which makes me think that the role of Grandma Dollarhyde, AKA Norma Bates on steroids and crack cocaine, was originally much more substantial.
Burstyn doesn’t ever appear onscreen, but she still manages to overact egregiously.
Manhunter didn’t feel the need to artlessly explain why Francis Dollarhyde was so troubled. Red Dragon over-explains in a way that robs the character of his humanity and makes him just another cartoonish monster with a murderous grudge against humanity.
Fiennes is a better and more accomplished actor than Tom Noonan, who played the role in Manhunter, but he delivers a much weaker performance in a role that has much less of an impact because there’s just so goddamn much of it.
In its bid to make everything as hammy and over-the-top as possible, Red Dragon plays up Dollarhyde’s obsession with the William Blake painting that gives the film and novel its name.
Manhunter had Noonan spend long hours getting a Red Dragon inked on his back, then realized that having a character reveal a massive tattoo of William Blake artwork didn’t work in film. It was much too much, and Mann’s film was defined by heroic restraint. Ratner shows no restraint here, so he prominently features a Red Dragon tattoo (very dissimilar from the one in the Fountains of Wayne song of the same name) AND has Francis travels to the Brooklyn Museum to eat Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun in a doomed bid to keep his alter-ego, the Great Red Dragon, from forcing him to kill.
The only way in which Red Dragon meets or exceeds Mann’s film is in the casting of Philip Seymour Hoffman as doomed tabloid sleazebag Freddy Lounds. Stephen Lang did a fine job in the 1986 adaptation. Lang is an impressive character actor but he’s no Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
Red Dragon’s cheesiness extends to its final scene, when Hannibal is told that there’s an FBI agent who wants to talk to him, except that she’s too attractive to be a fed. They stop just short of saying that she possesses the kind of beauty that might lead someone to try to assassinate the President of the United States to impress her. I could be wrong, but this is an embarrassingly clumsy reference to The Silence of the Lambs.
Norton used his payday here to help fund The 25th Hour, so at least something good came of this underwhelming and overwrought misfire.
In adapting Thomas Harris’ novel for the big screen, Manhunter made the right choice every time, with the possible exception of the spelling of Hannibal’s last name. Red Dragon makes the wrong choice every time.
That’s the difference, ultimately, between hackwork and the work of a true auteur.
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