It’s time once again to make a contribution to the Sir Anthony Hopkins Retirement Fund. Just remember, it’s a charity gig; you do it out of the goodness of your heart, not because you expect to get anything in return.

     This year’s fund is called Red Dragon, another adaptation of a Thomas Harris Hannival Lecter thriller which was already made back in 1989 as Manhunter. That film, which didn’t do well at the box office, was made by Michael Mann, who was still in his oh-baby-don’t-let-my-law-enforcement-deal-ruin-what-we-got phase. William Peterson played the FBI agent with the empathetic serial killer skills while Brian Cox was soigné Hannibal. Dante Spinotti, making his American debut, shot the movie in cool, cool colors, which might have drained the film of its suspense, had the story had the potential for any to begin with. Ah, but that’s the dirty secret of the Thomas Harris films.

     To bring them off at all, you have to need either a shameless and knowing director (Jonathan Demme, Silence of the Lambs) or one who is shameless and grandiose (Ridley Scott, Hannibal). This time, we get Brett Ratner, who is apparently just in a big hurry. Despite the fact that Spinotti – who has since done award-winning work on L.A. Confidential and The Insider – is again behind the camera, Red Dragon doesn’t look much better than you’d expect an expensive Hollywood film to look. There’s not much action and when there is, it’s not particularly thrilling or shocking.

     Mostly, there’s just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Pseudo-psycho-intellectual gab that never stops. The movies made from Harris’s books aren’t thrillers, they’re talk fests interrupted now and then by gore. In Manhunter, Mann tried to fix the problem by interposing pregnant silences – lots of them. It didn’t work. Demme, who really did solve the problem, treated the talk as actual acts of violence, assaults on the listener both within the movie and in the audience. Unfortunately, that made for a cheap-thrills kind of movie. Scott decided to come up with images as inflated and empty as the conversation and then pile on the grotesquerie, a solution which is occasionally provocative but generally dull.

     Ratner decided to rush from one scene to the next, barely establishing connections – they’re aren’t many anyway – in the hopes of getting a rise out of the audience with something, anything. The scene he dawdles over most involves a serial killer, Francis Dolarhyde (Ralph Fiennes) and a tabloid reporter, Freddy Loundes (Philip Seymour Hoffman) he’s got tied up in an old-fashioned wheelchair. Dolarhyde is angry that Freddy questioned his heterosexuality in an article so he’s kidnapped him and brought him down to his old Southern mansion. Dolarhyde has been toying with his captive and the audience, reaching an anti-climactic finish when he strips off his clothing and reveals a full-body tattoo of a dragon based on a print by William Blake. It’s a very showy scene, the two actors respectively prancing around and pleading for his life, Ratner coming up with obligatory one-shots and close-ups as needed. It’s also a total yawner, every action foreordained, a mere entr’acte until we get back to the real show, Sir Anthony’s Hannibal bit.

     The old lion gets to do a turn in the outside world with FBI agent Will Graham (Edward Norton) before he ends up in his cage (the movie’s a prequel to Lambs), so you think he’d be energized. But the good sir Knight, well-fed and sleek, doesn’t seem all that interested anymore. He’s grown bored with his role and either can’t or doesn’t care to hide it.

     What’s more fascinating is that the public hasn’t gotten bored with Hannibal, the man who makes cannibalism a dull subject. One of the movie’s earliest scenes is a dinner party at Lecter’s home, a nightmarish experience not because he’s obviously serving human flesh to his unknowing guests, but because he’s such a bore. Imagine accepting a dinner invitation from such a man and being stuck at his table for two hours. Now there’s a subject for a real horror movie.