Trashy movie with one amazing character.

Rating: 4/10 (18 April 2019)

There's one good thing about this movie and that is Hopkin's riveting performance as the inimitable Dr Lecture.
The scenes with him in our one of those rare treats in the movies where everything in a character from their look to their voice and their lines makes you want to hang a poster of them in all the rooms of your home.
It's the rest of the movie that palls. The flimsy plot they use as an excuse to get Lecter on screen focuses on some transsexual killer as its macguffin and this might have been somewhat interesting if this really was the story they were committed to tell and focus on. Like how even two really good pieces of music can sound jarring and stupid when played at the same time, the overall effect is of a disjointed movie that desperately required some rethinking of its plot direction. It's just goofy.
Jodie Foster's stoney performance as copper as the overzealous fed typically shows about as much emotion as my toaster. She doesn't feel like a person, just some crude character type that is just boring to watch and impossible to feel anything for. When she does finally show emotion it's like a daytime movie and she manages to help realize what is perhaps the most obnoxious, smug and heavy handed monologue in all cinema. Whoever wrote this seems desperate to convince the world that women in the work place are all emotionally sterile, hard to like nitwits making this movie a huge middle finger to feminism even if its bad guy wasn't a man who wants to be a woman. Or woman trapped in a man's body, I'm not really fussed.
There are so many moments where you really feel the classic this might have become but the movie it should have been is just a subplot. Make Lecter the protagonist, Clarice the antagonist and Bill just one of several killers uses and there's your movie.