Familiarity breeds contempt. At least it does the fourth time around.

Red Dragon, the fourth, and I pray last, motion picture to feature Dr. Hannibal Lecter, is a competently made thriller that should scare the pants off many a viewer...providing that you haven't seen the previous three films nor read any of Thomas Harris' novels. Otherwise, you may experience two feelings other than thrills and chills: déjà vu and boredom.

The film opens with FBI agent Will Graham (Edward Norton) capturing Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) at his home in 1980. The arrest nearly claims Graham's life, resulting in his "early retirement" from the bureau. Years later, after the murders of two families, Graham reluctantly agrees to come back to the FBI and assist in the case. Graham soon realizes that the best way to catch this killer, the Tooth Fairy a.k.a. Francis Dollarhyde (Ralph Fiennes), is to find a way to get inside the killer's mind. In order to achieve that, Graham would have to probe the mind of another killer who is equally as brilliant and twisted. Take a wild guess as to who that is.

To their credit, director Ratner and screenwriter Ted Tally, who also penned the script for Silence Of the Lambs, are quite faithful to their literary source. Yet, the film never manages to come to life the way that Lambs, Manhunter or even Hannibal (which I think is much better than this film) did. Ratner and Tally are so keen on making Red Dragon a clone of Lambs that they fail to establish any sort of individual identity for their film. The directing is competent (something I couldn't say about Ratner's previous "work"), but underwhelming. That all-important atmosphere of danger, suspense and horror is never established. Danny Elfman's overbearing, weak orchestral score doesn't help matters any in the least.

I enjoyed Hopkins in both Lambs and Hannibal, but his performance here is pretty damn weak as are Harvey Keitel (as FBI agent Jack Crawford) and Mary Louise Parker (as Graham's wife)'s. They seem bored, phoning in their performances from wherever they were counting their paychecks. On the other hand, Norton, Fiennes and Emily Watson as Reba, Dollarhyde's blind love interest, are quite good. They all bring conviction and believability to their roles, especially Fiennes who is no stranger to playing human monsters (Schindler's List).

I would like to suggest a plot idea for the fifth Hannibal Lecter film (c'mon, you know it's going to happen): have Hannibal devour himself for dinner. That way we can be guaranteed that the series would mercifully come to an end.

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