Why?

Rating: 4/10 (17 January 2017)

Look, "overrated" doesn't necessarily mean bad. I liked this film when it first came out, and I found it very entertaining. But the extremely high amount of praise that this film gets, makes no sense to me at all. The supposedly menacing and creepy Hannibal Lecter, who ate his victims and is now locked away from society, sounds totally ridiculous with his cheesy one-liners about cannibalism and killing. Jodie Foster, who plays our main protagonist (an elite FBI agent in training) looks and sounds about thirteen years old, and the entire time I was watching, she kept reminding me of an actress from a television after-school special playing dress-up and pretending to be a cop. The pace of this film was rather dull as well, unnecessarily long with hammy characters that seem like they belong in a Troma movie rather than anything highly rated. It still blows my mind that a brilliant film like "The Killing Fields" has never been selected for national preservation, but this corny crime thriller was. Honestly I've seen low-budget slashers better than this thing... so why the high reputation and constant fans saying "oh god, this film is awesome! Hannibal is soooo sexy!" and all that? To each their own, everybody likes different things, but with this one, which currently has an 8.6/10 overall rating on IMDb, how did that even happen? Was this one of those "right place at the right time" kind of things where it hits a generation by doing something innovative for the time, thus becoming popular? Or is there seriously something here I'm missing? I've watched it several times and I don't find it complex or overly intriguing in any way whatsoever. And I really like Foster and Hopkins as actors, from Hopkins' role as the grieving father in Audrey-Rose, to Foster as the dying little girl on a Nova Scotia vacation in Echoes of a Summer, but in this film it tries to put them together in some sort of tragic love story, which really plays out strangely. I kept cringing at Foster's character's pretentiousness and show-off attitude and Hannibal Lecter's pointless riddles and games, which are interesting at first but quickly become boring and stupid.