Hannibal (2001)

!! SPOILER WARNING !!

Ten years after he escaped from captivity, Dr Hannibal Lecter is still missing, but a cult of personality has grown up around him. Collectors are willing to pay good money for memorabilia connected with him and his captivity. One of those collectors is the incredibly wealthy Mason Verger, Lecter's now horribly disfigured fourth victim, the only one to have survived the doctor's depredations. Kept alive by life-support machines and medicine, Verger obsessively collects Lecter memorabilia while plotting his revenge. His latest acquisition is the restraining mask used in the hospital to prevent Lecter from biting staff, bought from one of the former nurses of the now closed-down facility, Barney

Meanwhile, Clarice Starling is having problems. In Washington DC, her operation to apprehend drugs baroness Evelda Drumgo goes horribly wrong when Drumgo, four members of her gang and one BATF officer are killed in a shoot-out in a crowded fish market. Although the chaos had been caused by a reckless DC police officer, it was Starling's operation and she's the one being blamed for the fiasco by her superiors and the press.

At a meeting to discuss her position in the FBI, Starling meets Paul Krendler from the Justice Department who is being manipulated behind the scenes by Verger. The meeting ends inconclusively but later Starling learns that Verger has some new information on Lecter that he will only pass on to her. Although reluctant to go back on the Lecter case, she has no choice and drives out to visit Verger and his palatial mansion.

Verger insists on bringing up a series of sex offences against minors that he was charged with many years before, then tells Starling about his encounter with Lecter. He's lured Lecter to his apartment in the hops of a sexual encounter, but Lecter had turned the tables, giving him a powerful hallucinogenic drug then talking him into disfiguring his face with a shard of broken mirror. He then gives her an x-ray he received in the post from Buenos Aries two weeks ago, an x-ray of Lecter's arm taken while he was incarcerated.

When Starling tries to track down other records and personal items relating to Lecter, who finds that most of them have disappeared over the years, but she does find a video from a CCTV camera showing Lecter attacking and biting the face of a nurse. She also sees Barney in the video and decides to pay him a visit. She's done some research and has found that Barney has been selling Lecter memorabilia for huge sums of money and asks that he turn over the rest of what he has. She also learns that Barney has some audio tapes that Dr Chilton secretly made of Starling's conversations with Lecter which she takes home and listens to.

In Florence, Italy, Inspector Rinaldo Pazzi takes an interest in Dr Fell, a British scholar whose application to become head of the Capponi library is being debated by a panel of academics. Pazzi is investigating the disappearance of the previous librarian and approaches Fell, who is really Lecter, to see if he knows anything that may help in his investigations. Pazzi has recently been reassigned from the Il Mostro case, the hunt for a serial killer stalking the city, and Pazzi is clearly disturbed by the down-turn in his fortunes.

Starling receives a message from the Guinness Book of World Records - she's now the female FBI agent who has shot and killed the most people! She also receives a note from Lecter, taunting her about her recent failings and noting that he's not on teh FBI's ten most wanted list, wondering if this means that she's back on the case.

Starling takes the letter, which carries a faint fragrance, to a team of team of perfume specialists who tell her that the perfume has traces of ambergris, a whale product banned in many countries, but not in some European states. They promise to get her a list of places this particular fragrance could have come from.

Back in Florence, Pazzi catches sight of a CCTV video of a perfume shop and recognises "Fell". He's curious when he hears that the tape has been requested by the FBI who won't say what they want it for. Intrigued, Fell starts to tail Lecter, noting that at restaurants, he's obsessive about cleaning his wine class after he's finished with it, to remove fingerprints. At home, he accesses the FBI's VICAP software via the internet and finds Lecter's photograph on the ten most wanted list, realising now just Dr Fell really is. Noting that there's a substantial reward from a private source for information leading to the apprehension of Lecter, Pazzi starts to hatch a plan...

In her basement, Starling has a collection of crime scene photos from around Europe that bear the hallmarks of Lecter. She surprises Krendler who has dropped by to see what she's up to. He tries to intimidate her and it turns out that they had an affair many years ago before she ended it, sending him home to his wife.

Starling receives the CCTV tapes from Italy but the one she wants hasn't arrived and she has to call Agent Benetti in Florence who promises to send her another one. In the meantime, Pazzi has started on his road to recovering the $3 million reward, calling the number he found on a website. It seems to be out of order but as he walks away from the public payphone, it rings and a voice tells him to the in touch with a local lawyer. The lawyer tells him that there is a $100,000 advance on receipt of a fingerprint from Lecter.

Pazzi calls on "Fell" at his quarters in the Capponi library where the doctor shows him several suitcases full of stuff belonging to the previous curator. Lecter talks about Pazzi's relative, Francesco de Pazzi, who was thrown naked from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio, a noose around his neck, in retribution for the killing of a member of the powerful Medici family. Later, Pazzi puts into motion his plan to get Lecter's fingerprints - he forces a young pickpocket to try to steal from Lecter, hoping that the doctor will instinctively grab the thief's wrist, around which Pazzi has placed a wide silver bracelet. The plan is only partially successful - although Pazzi gets the fingerprint, the pickpocket is eviscerated by Lecter.

Verger is delighted with the news that he may at last have found Lecter and calls Sardinia, where his contact Carlo has been breeding a pack of vicious boars for him. Verger arranges for the animals, which have been specially trained to attack and kill humans, to be flown to the States.

Pazzi is paid his advance and is told that the rest will be paid to him when he points out Lecter - he's also told not to be involved anymore, but he insists on staying on board to make sure that everything goes off smoothly. That evening, he accompanies his wife Allegra to the opera where Lecter is also in the audience. Afterwards, they meet and Lecter flirts - politely of course - with Allegra.

Back in Washington, Starling accesses the VICAP user logs and finds that someone has been logging in from Italy - Pazzi, of course, though she wonders if it might be Lecter. The CCTV tape from Italy finally arrives and Starling is staggered to see Lecter visiting a perfume shop. She calls Florence and confronts Pazzi, warning him that Lecter is dangerous and telling him that she knows that he's been accessing VICAP. Realising that he's trying to catch Lecter on his own for the reward money, she tries to warn him off, but he hangs up on her.

Later that night, Carlo and his men are in lying in wait for Lecter who is giving a lecture on Dante and avarice. He uses slides to demonstrate the parallels between Judas Iscariot and Dante's character Pier della Vigna, both of who died by hanging. In some of the engravings, Judas is shown hanging with his bowels torn open. Pazzi offers to buy Lecter a drink after the talk, but Lecter has smelled a ruse - he shows Pazzi slides of his ancestor's execution, hanging beneath the very windows they're standing at. Lecter then tells Pazzi that he's "giving very serious thought... to eating your wife" before overpowering him. 

Lecter learns from the now incapacitated Pazzi that he's sold him to Verger and that men are waiting for him outside. He's surprised when Pazzi's mobile phone rings and, answering it, he hears Starling's voice for the first time in ten years. As the shocked crowds in the square below look on, Lecter disembowels Pazzi and throws his body, suspended from a noose, from the window. Later, Starling receives video surveillance footage of the murder and recognises Lecter's face as he emerges from the shadows.

Verger has also received a copy of the tape and decides that he has to lure Lecter out of hiding. Reasoning that he is excited by distress, he orders that Starling become distressed. He calls Krendler and tells him that a postcard to Starling, apparently from Lecter, was written and sent by him and that he's paying him five hundred thousand dollars to set her up. Krendler takes the postcard to Director Noonan who has no choice but to place her on administrative leave. She tries to tell Noonan that Verger is trying to capture Lecter and that Krendler is being paid to help him, though Noonan can't do anything to help her.

Later, Lecter - now relocated to the States - breaks into Krendler's house and steals a telephone bill for identification purposes. He then goes on a shopping spree, before stealing a set of surgical instruments and a wheelchair from a hospital. He then sneaks into Starling's house while she's asleep and watches over her...

Starling is woken by her phone ringing and Lecter starts leading her on a trail that she hopes will eventually bring them face to face. He leads her across town, asking her to talk to him about how she feels about what has happened to her recently. She ends up at Union Station where she uses background sounds to close in on Lecter, slowly realising that she's being followed by Verger's men. Lecter leaves her a pair of Gucci shoes in a photo booth and is then attacked by Verger's men who stun him with a taser and bundle him into the back of a van. Starling tries to stop them but they get away.

Starling informs her superiors who send teams out to Mason Verger's mansion, but they find nothing. In fact, Lecter's being held in the back of Carlo's van and Starling takes it on herself to call at the mansion to see what's really going on. She gets there shortly after Lecter arrives, wheeled in to meet Verger strapped to a trolley. Verger is planning on feeding Lecter to his pack of boars, making him die slowly and in agony.

Starling breaks into the compound where the boars are being kept and guns down some of Verger's men. As the boars break in to the arena where Lecter is being held, she's hit and wounded by another of Verger's men. Lecter carries her to safety as the boars eat the men that Starling shot and Lecter persuades Verger's terrified doctor, Cordell, to push the crippled man into the pit and put the blame for his death on Lecter. Cordell does so and flees as Verger is eaten alive by his own boars.

Lecter drives an unconscious Starling out to a house in the country where he tends her wounds. The house is owned by Krendler who turns up there for a 4th of July weekend break and is taken captive by Lecter. When Starling comes too, she's been dressed for dinner and woozy from the morphine that Lecter is doped her with, and makes her way groggily downstairs where she's able to call for help. In the kitchen, Lecter is preparing a meal and finds him serving a docile and compliant Krendler in the dining room.

A still dopey Starling, playing for time until help arrives, joins them at the table and is horrified when Lecter removes Krendler's baseball cap and reveals that he's removed the top of his head, exposing his brain which he then starts dissecting, places pieces on a small frying pan then feeding them back to Krendler. Starling struggles with Lecter but he traps her hair in the fridge door and rips off the handle, leaving her trapped. He lunges at her as if to bite her, but kisses her instead - while he does so, she manages to cuff him to her. He threatens to chop off her hand and Starling screams in agony.

But when the police arrive, she's free and intact - Lecter chopped his own hand off and Starling finds that one of the boats down on the river is missing. Lecter has escaped again. He's next seen on an aircraft, trying clumsily to eat with just one hand and being helped by a friendly child. But what is that brain-like substance he's feeding the boy from his hamper...?

KEVIN LYONS