Hannibal

(18, 131 minutes)

TIRED of all those nice cookery programmes? Here comes Dr Hannibal 'The Cannibal' Lecter to offer an alternative slice of culinary life, prepared with only the fleshiest of ingredients, of course.

Lecter, psychiatrist, serial killer and chef, returns to the sliver, sorry silver, screen ten years after The Silence Of The Lambs marked a career peak for Jodie Foster and director Jonathan Demme and provided an Oscar-winning tour de force for Anthony Hopkins.

Of the trio, only Hopkins returns, with a suitably big pay cheque - the biggest advance in Hollywood history for the man from the big bank advert. At the outset of the year, MGM's Hannibal was installed as 2-1 favourite to top the box-office hit list in 2001, such is the combined pulling power of Hopkins' devious, deadly Lecter and Thomas Harris's novels.

Alongside Hopkins, Julianne Moore is invited to Foster-care the very straight role of FBI agent Clarice Starling and British director Ridley Scotts accepts a dinner invitation to dine out on Hannibal after the epic escapades of Gladiator. As you would expect, Scott goes to the end of the earth to make a feast of Hannibal... visually.

Still on the run, and riding high in the FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted chart, Dr Lecter has assumed a comfortable new identity as an art historian, quite the aesthetic dandy in his Florence hideaway, ever careful to leave no trace on a wine glass (he still prefers red) and giving lectures on matters of art and the heart. Out of these Italian shadows he steps to renew his battle of wills in America with Agent Starling, ten years older, serious as hell and driven by an independent streak undimmed by a recent failed drug bust.

Unbeknown to Starling, she is the pawn in a revenge plot being mounted by mutilated millionaire Mason Verger (Gary Oldman, uncredited until the end, unrecognisable throughout and dry as cold toast). Verger survived his slice of the Hannibal action, but his face didn't, after he took up the doctor's suggestion of chopping off great chunks of cheek with glass. Now Verger wants to feed him not to the fishes but his wild boars.

The boars' eating habits are shown in graphic detail, as indeed are other killings, and Scott's movie is inferior to the original as a result of sacrificing Hitchcock-style suggestion and tension for such a slaughter show. 'Silence' has been replaced by noise; too many underlying themes, unlike Lecter's cannibalistic cuisine, are left under-cooked, particularly Starling's role in a male-dominated world.

Nevertheless, the psychological interplay between Hopkins's disturbingly charming yet chilling Lecter and Moore's equally fixated Starling still has its riveting moments; there is a pitch-black humour at play in both Hopkins and Oldman, and if Dr Lecter does not scare in the manner of a deacade ago, his idea of haute cuisine will repel even London's most fashionable tables. Verdict: Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter is still okey-dokey; Hannibal is merely OK rather than a KO.