Not quite as baarilliant as ewe might have herd.

Rating: 7/10 (9 February 2012)

Five times Oscar winner The Silence of the Lambs is a class act in many respects, but there are several factors—issues with the script that many fans seem to have happily chosen to ignore—which prevent me from finding the film such a wholly satisfying experience.
With a little suspension of disbelief, I can accept that FBI boss Crawford (Scott Glenn) might believe that Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) could help in profiling serial killer Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine), but what are the chances of him knowing the killer's actual identity? Pretty damn slim if you ask me—almost as unlikely as Crawford assigning a rookie agent like Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) to interrogate a manipulative psychopath in the first place!
Swallow all that, and you'll probably have no problem with Lecter's escape, but I know I'm not alone in finding this pivotal scene far-fetched in the extreme. Even if I let the whole 'pen thing' slide (Hannibal's a master of sleight of hand and a whizz at picking locks–fair enough), I still struggle to believe that it is possible to fool an entire team of highly trained cops and medics by slipping a dead man's face over your own. Just ain't going to happen.
And then there's the ending, which after all of the slow-burn psychological games between Lecter and Starling, suddenly goes into over-drive, glossing over details in a hurry to get to the typically tense Hollywood-style finale: all of a sudden, the FBI have Buffalo Bill's true identity, Clarice Starling has tracked the nut-job to his lair, and it's all on for an exciting climax inside the pitch black, labyrinthine basement where the psycho skins his victims.
Thankfully, even with these frustratingly ill-considered moments taking the film down a peg or two in my opinion, Silence of the Lambs is still well worth a watch thanks to director Jonathan Demme's slick handling of the material, and career defining turns from several of his standout cast. Hopkins iconic performance as Lecter is mesmerising, the actor deeply menacing even behind a sheet of unbreakable glass or completely immobile, securely fastened to a trolley in his iconic face-mask; Foster is also memorable as Clarice, who unwisely allows Hannibal inside her mind to exploit her emotional fragility. But it is Ted Levine who steals the show: as sexually confused, mumbling maniac Buffalo Bill, whose goal is to make himself a suit from women's skin, Levine is absolutely superb, providing the film with many of its most memorable moments and delivering several of my favourite quotable lines of dialogue.
All together now: 'It rubs the lotion on its skin...'