MANHUNTER The wrong guy's hamming it up! What a weird and wonderful mishmash of things that work and things that don't. Manhunter shouldn't succeed half as well as it does, considering how creakily made it seems much of the time and how some actors make some utterly absurd choices in the nature of their performances. But succeed it does, perhaps by fabulous accident, perhaps just by having enough strengths to overcome its many weaknesses. It scarcely seems necessary anymore to point out that this was the one movie (and book; it's based on Thomas Harris' Red Dragon) featuring Hannibal Lecter before he hit the big time; the only people who don't know that already probably won't ever find their way to reading this review. A lot of people prefer it to Silence Of The Lambs, and a lot of people prefer this version of Lecter to the one which would later make a much larger impression. Honestly, I don't know why. William Petersen stars as Will Graham, a semi-retired FBI agent (who put Lecter away in the first place) who is brought back to work when a wacky fella nicknamed the Tooth Fairy takes it upon himself to kill off an entire household at every full moon. Graham was the best in the psycho-catching biz because he was good at thinking like a psycho - so good that he had to spend some time in the psychiatric wing after he caught Lecter (under circumstances made fairly vague in the film and not that much more clear in the novel; at any rate, it was more or less by accident). Reluctantly taking the job, Graham decides to pay a visit to Lecter under the pretense of asking his advice, but in reality, he's trying to get the ol' psycho mindset back. Ah, Hannibal Lecter. Instead of the lip-smacking Anthony Hopkins, Hannibal here is played by a much more restrained Brian Cox. Cox gets the best scene in the film, where with only a phone (which cannot be dialed) and a stick of gum, he manages to swangle some fairly hush-hush information. It's incredibly creepy. For the rest of his meager screen time (two other scenes), well...track down any review for this movie from 1986 and see how much of an impression Cox made on anybody. You'll be lucky if you find one which mentions him at all. Cox, as an actor, is at least as good as Hopkins. But there are two strange acting decisions he makes here: leaving his mouth to hang open slackly at the end of many sentences, and a staunch refusal to pronounce the last letter in many words. The former makes him look a little on the dopey side; the latter makes him sound that way. The scene with the phone erases any doubt as to how much intellect is boxed up in that cell, but thank God for it because without it, I'd be wondering why this guy's in prison and not out there doing whatever job people with speech impediments do. Cox's performance as Lecter is like a microcosm of the film around him; very lucky to have what's right about it, since otherwise it'd be capsized and sunk by what's wrong. Hannibal, even as a character, is a little different than Hopkins' version (even the spelling is different). If there's any reference to cannibalism in this movie, I missed it; I'm thinking of one scene in which it might have been mentioned but it's too late to go over that again, since I returned the movie days ago. Where Hopkins played Lecter as a man who was incessantly mentally active, Cox seems like he just rolled out of bed. Actually, in his first scene, he DID just roll out of bed. Hopkins's Lecter enthusiastically wanted a peek into the head of the FBI agent who came a-knockin'; Cox's Lecter seem utterly bored with the rest of humanity and not much more interested even in the man who caught him. Silence Of The Lambs showed us Lecter in a stone dungeon. Manhunter imprisons him in a gleaming white, antiseptic cage, within a gleaming white, antiseptic, apparently very low-security building (actually, a museum). Every wall and surface of half the rooms in this movie are bare and white or off-white. Silence gave us a lengthy list of instructions for what to do and (far more importantly) not to do when going near Lecter's cell; Manhunter gets one moment in the "phone scene" where the phone is delivered and a guard basically tells him to stand out of reach and not turn around. I dunno, guys; Hopkins' Lecter is so much more fun than Cox's that it seems like they're not even the same character. Some people prefer this version as being less hammy and more serious, but not I. It's definitely less hammy, but given a choice between the ham, or the slack jaw and so many words that now end with an apostrophe, I'll take Hopkins any day. Anyway, enough on that. Every time people talk about this movie it always comes down to the ol' Hopkins-vs.-Cox debate and there's a lot more to this movie than Brian Cox (like I said, three scenes!). The rest of the cast mostly does a great job; Tom Noonan in particular is wonderful as the Tooth Fairy, especially in a subplot which has him romancing a blind woman (Joan Allen). Say what you will about the Tooth Fairy, but he sure knows how to make an impression on a first date (and for once, for the right reasons!). It's so, so interesting to see a psychopath whose killing is, apparently, based on sexual desire (of which we've seen no end in the movies), but for once this one's gettin' some. Forgive him the shotgun-wielding climax; the neat thing about his performance is that it makes you actually like the killer in SPITE of his madness, not because of it. A lot of movie psychos are endearing because of how loopy they are (an obvious example being Lecter himself); this one is endearing because he faces the same problems within normal social structures that a lot of the rest of us do. As for Petersen himself, I've always found him a little spotty. Most of the time he's great; a scene in the supermarket where he tries to explain to his son why he had to "go away" for a while is sweet and chilling at the same time. But when there are scenes where he makes a breakthrough in the case - and there are at least three of them - he hams it up way more than Hopkins ever could. The delivery in these scenes is Shatner-like - no, it's well beyond Shatner. Images of Charlton Heston pounding the sand and crying out at the half-buried statue of liberty spring to mind. Manhunter shows the majority of its flaws on a technical level. Writer/director Michael Mann would of course go on to (im)prove himself in spades, but here, it seems like he thinks he's still making Miami Vice episodes. It looks rather like a TV movie, and while the more-80's-than-the-80's-actually-were set design (remember all that white?) and horrible synth-pop soundtrack surely seemed like good ideas at the time, they haven't in the least bit aged well. Some movies which so proudly show the period in which they were made manage to go on to come across as simply being a product of the time, now let's move on and enjoy the movie. Others are pretty obnoxious about it. Manhunter falls (that is, crashes) into the latter camp. Things get shakier yet. That scene in the supermarket has one of the most glaring continuity errors I've ever seen (one guy tried telling me that this was a "jump cut used to disorient the viewer", but every time I see this, I watch this scene specifically for that possibility and in the end I invariably call bullshit on that one). Boom mikes are all over the place, though I'm willing to give the film the benefit of the doubt in that they were probably supposed to be matted out. A scene late in the film where the Tooth Fairy confronts that blind lady at her house is confusing as hell, since it ends very unclearly, and when the movie next picks up this thread of the story, suddenly they're at HIS house. He must have brought her there, but how? She's conscious, she seems fine, but she doesn't know where she is, and doesn't appear to know how she got there either. The IMDb mistakenly lists this as a plot hole, but it's so easy to think it is that I could hardly blame anybody who came away from that impression. I dunno, the real question I'm wondering is how Hannibal got that note from the Tooth Fairy; not all prisoners in all institutions are going to have their mail regularly searched, but it seems to me that if anybody would, it's Hannibal Lecter. Finally, we get the climax, a nightmare of bad editing and worse gunplay FX work (to say nothing of the Tooth Fairy's unintentionally amusing macho posturing). Shotgun blasts destroy eggs but don't scratch the floor they're resting on. Cords used to yank people after they get "shot" are plainly visible. Half the cuts in this scene (and there are a LOT of cuts) are so jarring they seem like it's jumbled together from shots from (at least) two different movies. I know that nonsequential shooting makes this largely moot, but do you ever see a movie and come away with the impression that they just ran out of money? I can see Mann now: "Dammit, we should've filmed the scene with the jogger last!" As would be the case with Harris' Hannibal, Manhunter's ending is changed from what we saw in the book. The book's ending was depressing, unlikely, and more than a little gratuitous. I'm sure it's got a lot of fans ("It's darker!"), but it's extremely mean-spirited and without any purpose at all. What we're given in the film was enough; I find its ending a lot more satisfying overall (though sabotaged a little; Manhunter, for some reason, doesn't follow through with the weight of what's happened by showing us the consequences of Graham's decision. Instead, we're just told.). For all the complaining I do about this movie, it still works overall. It's definitely NOT Hannibal Lecter's equivalent to Y Kant Tori Read, Make Them Die Slowly or Now Is The Time (if you don't know, count yourself lucky and don't ask). The lower profile this movie has held over time than its more infamous followup is not due to anybody's present-day embarrassment, just an accident of time I guess. If you haven't seen it by now, you probably should. BACK TO THE M's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE