“Manhunter” is the first film to feature the popular character Hannibal Lecter (or Lecktor as he is spelt here) and it is also one of the worst. This film was also an early effort by director Michael Mann, who I feel has moved onto much better things (“Heat”). I much prefer the remake of this film, “Red Dragon”.

In this film, F.B.I. agent (William Petersen “Fear”, “Young Guns II”) is called back into action in order to track down a ruthless serial killer nicknamed the ‘Tooth Fairy’ (Tom Noonan “Last Action Hero”). With seemingly no pattern and no of catching him, agent Will Graham must turn to his arch nemesis Hannibal Leckter (Brian Cox “Troy”, “Braveheart”).

The characters in this film are meant to be harsh and disturbing but they come across as wooden and lifeless. The only one that really interested me was of course the Leckter character but he gets very little screen-time here and also many will be surprised that there is no mention of him being a cannibal. The film spends most of its time with agent Graham but the performance seems so forced yet so stale that you find yourself detached from him and that’s one of the movie’s biggest flaws.

“Manhunter” is awful when it comes to its sound editing as frequently, it will blast out songs from their middle randomly during a shot and this combined with the weak characters, makes this just a very poor film. It is so pretentious in its pursuit of being artistic that you lose respect for it; it tries to ram so many artistic clichés down your throat then you’ll be shocked to find that David Lynch (“Dune”) didn’t work on it. The best film in the “Hannibal” series has got to be “The Silence of the Lambs” so see that if you want to see great use of the character. If you just want to see this story done better than watch “Red Dragon” because even though that is a flawed film it is massively superior to this.