Manhunter (1986) – The Unequaled Original Masterpiece!

Note: I’ve written this so that there are NO spoilers in case you haven’t seen both movies!

Silence of the Lambs was released in 1991 and Red Dragon was released in 2002 – Manhunter was released 5 years before SOTL and 16 years before Red Dragon, which was a total reboot of the original script from Manhunter, but not as skillfully done! Both movies were taken from the 1981 Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon, and because they’re both working with basically the same script, both movies share the same story and characters, and even the exact same dialogue in places!

I feel that if you’re going to re-make a movie, then you should do it better than the original, or at least as good! In some respects Red Dragon did, but mostly it fell short of the original Manhunter, let’s look at a few point-by-point overview examples:

Although Manhunter has a very 80’s feel, which dates it (even the soundtrack screams 80’s), this is one of the early, but brilliant Michael Mann films that helped him to establish his impressive career! Michael Mann wrote the screenplay for this film and consequently created his own version of the story.

Although I love Edward Norton, he can’t hold a candle to William Peterson who killed it in the same role as Doctor Will Graham in Manhunter (Incidentally, he went on to be a PERFECT fit as Doctor Gil Grissom in CSI (Las Vegas), which was a similar role to this one for him)!

I must however, wholeheartedly admit that Brian Cox (although I like him a lot for certain roles), couldn’t hold a candle to Anthony Hopkins in the same role (of course, he’s the man; respect!).

In the role of “The Tooth Fairy”, character Francis Dollarhyde; I felt that Tom Noonan was even better than Ralph Fiennes! This was in part due to the acting, but also greatly due to Michael Mann’s presentation of him, which was vastly superior to that of Brett Ratner’s version! The mood creating music, the anguished looks, the broken dashboard, and the swift action that followed brought everything to an explosive conclusion via the classic Iron Butterfly’s: In a godda da vida, which put the scene over the top in my book!

Overall, I felt that this was a superior film to Red Dragon (its blatant copy) in many respects! The only missing component was Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Hannibal Lecter; however, even he had a nominal role in this movie, since it was technically a prequel to The Silence of the Lambs (or became so 16 long years later)!

Thoughts?

Submitted August 02, 2020 at 04:51PM by Kombucha_Kingdom https://ift.tt/3hY74JR