Red Dragon - 2002

Not bad, but I think it somehow lacked something. I don’t know, it wasn’t scary, it lacked atmosphere I guess. 

It starts with a bit of background story. We see Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) at a concert and then at dinner with guests saying a musician went missing, and Hannibal saying he can’t tell them what it is they’re eating because if they knew they wouldn’t eat it…

We see Will Graham (Edward Norton) coming to meet him, saying he’s thought of something about the Chesapeak Ripper, that the murderer doesn’t keep trophies but probably eats the parts he takes from the victims, and Hannibal understands he’s getting too close. When left alone for a moment Will finds a book of recipes and that’s the final piece he needed but as he turns Hannibal stabs him, but Will doesn’t die easily. Will stabs him with some arrows and then shoots him. Neither of them dies. There’s a trial but we know everything via news headlines. Hannibal is found guilty and put into Chilton’s (Anthony Heald) mental institution. Graham retires and lives peacefully with a wife and her kid for a few years, until Jack Crawford (Harvey Keitel) comes looking for his help again. There’s a new serial killer, he’s killed two families already, and the media call him the Tooth Fairy (il lupo mannaro in Italian. I guess in Italy ‘la fatina dei denti’ was too childish so they changed it…).

Will accepts to help him. He takes a look at the scene of the crime then he visits Hannibal to ask his help. 

Hannibal cheats his way into learning Will’s new address, and starts corresponding with the Fairy, a man who thinks he’s becoming the big Red Dragon. He gives the Dragon Will’s address telling him to kill them all because they’re getting too close, but the FBI learns about it in time and collects both Molly (Mary-Louise Parker) and Josh and takes them to safety. 

Will and Jack then make journalist Freddie (Philip Seymour Hoffman) write a few lies about the Dragon to make him angry, and he gets angry alright. He takes Freddie, explains to him what he is, then has him record a statement. D then bites Freddie and puts him on fire before releasing the still-burning body strapped to a wheelchair. Will visits Hannibal again, who tells him he should know, that he watches but doesn’t see…

The dragon is called Francis Dolarhyde (Ralph Fiennes) but people call him D. D meets a girl, Reba (Emily Watson). She’s blind, so he feels comfortable around her because she can’t see him. They spend time together, and as a gift he takes her to touch a tiger into deep anesthetic, then she kisses him and they sleep together, and the next morning D has an interior fight with the dragon because D doesn’t want to kill her. Maybe trying to fight off the dragon, D eats Blake’s painting or drawing, whatever it was. He hit two women to be left alone with it, but doesn’t kill them. 

He sees a guy that just took Reba home, and he shoots him in the head and abducts her. 

He brings her to his home and tells her he wants to save her from ‘him’, and the only way is to shoot her first and shoot himself next, because he has sees Will looking for him where he works and knows he’s very close. He sets the house on fire, then tells her he can’t shoot her and she hears a shot and moves closer and touches a dead face and thinks he shot himself. She manages to get out, right when the FBI arrives. She tells them what she believes to be true, that he’s dead, and the house explodes before Will can go in to check. 

Will thinks it’s all over, but analyses reveal that it wasn’t D’s body. When Will sees a broken mirror in his own house he understands that D is there. He enters a room and finds him holding Josh. Trying to stall him Will starts shouting all the bad things that D got told as a child and that Will read in his diary. When D lets go of Josh, Will manages to make him run and then hides with him in another room, waiting for him to enter to shoot him, but he doesn’t come. Will looks from under the door and sees Molly coming and then D’s feet behind her. He yells “Molly get down”, she goes flat on the floor and Will and D shoot at each other until they fall down. Molly runs to Will of course, and he tells her “shoot him, shoot him” so she uses his gun and shoots D three more times, just to be safe.  It’s over. Will is back with his family, Hannibal writes to him to tell him that he thinks of him; Will reads the letter and then throws it away. 

At the end we have Chilton telling Hannibal that there is a young FBI woman to see him: “I’ll tell her you said no”, but Hannibal asks “what is her name?” and that’s the end. We know who that was, and what happened next. 

ITA red dragon