Movie sequels, as a general rule, get down on their knees and give the audience bad road head. The audience sits there with their pants open and daydreams about what the first film was like instead of looking at the whore slurping away in their laps. And those are the better sequels. The really horrible ones just cop a feel through your trousers and call it a day.

To misquote the late, great Raymond Chandler just a bit, "Movies are like a kiss. The first is magical. The second is routine. The third one, you take the girl's clothes off."

In that vein, then, Hannibal is a breath of fresh air. The Silence of the Lambs was a slow, seducing waltz, and as the final curtain goes down on it, you and the film head off to the back for a little hanky-panky. Well, it takes ten years to get there, and when you get there you find out that your playmate is a little on the wild side - whips and leather and chains, oh my. And maybe that's not your thing. But Hannibal at least tries to seduce you on its own terms.

Can you imagine how easy it would have been to let Hannibal just coast on Silence's buildup? If you can't, go see just about any sequel. For nearly any sequel, you have to have seen the original first. They are derivative works, and this weakness just pervades them throughout. Hannibal doesn't feel that same way. The events of Silence of the Lambs are treated as a sort of best left alone prologue, and the film begins in medias reis.

The psychologist Pavlov once trained dogs to salivate at the ring of a bell. It's the concept of conditioning. Movie critics aren't just conditioned, they're like the POWs in The Manchurian Candidate, smoking yak dung and thinking it's tobacco. They manage to convince themselves that the job of a sequel is bad road head, that they want bad road head, and when they show up to Hannibal and instead find a film that wants to work you a bit, they turn running.

Admit it - you liked Hannibal Lector. Yes, you, fuckstick! Yes, I'm talking to you! You thought he was cool. You thought he was suave and debonair. You were charmed. You thought that his cannibalism was some sort of weird tic, something he tried struggling with but just ended up accepting.

You were charmed by his intelligence. Hannibal shows you that academically, he is the same as he is culinary - obsessed with the dark, macabre secrets of the underworld, a twisted sort, who isn't a well-cultured sicko, but somebody who has cultured their own sickness into a tart little dish.

An example, from uber-critic Roger Ebert: "In Hannibal, Lecter can move freely, and that removes part of the charm. By setting him free to roam, the movie diminishes his status from a locus of evil to a mere predator. He can escape from traps seemingly at will, but that misses the point. He is never more sympathetic here than when he's strapped to a cruciform brace and about to be fed, a little at a time, to wild boars. His voice at that point sounds a note of pity for his tormentors, and we remember the earlier Lecter."