Where Ratner shocks us with flash-frames of mirror-socketed women, Mann had it right. Graham falling asleep on a plane, inadvertently exposing a young girl to the horror of his evidence photos, in one scene telling us everything we need to know about what these crimes look like and describing the differences between our world and Graham's. There's no need to barrage the audience with some of the images in Red Dragon; Dollarhyde is demon enough without the continual reminders Ratner provides. I'm assuming he's giving the audience what he believes they want and he should be smarter than to succumb. In Hannibal it was quickly obvious that there was no story, so the only way to watch it was as a horror equivalent of a Bond picture: just give me Hannibal, being Hannibal. But there is a story in Red Dragon, and the gore obscures it.

The core of that story is Francis Dollarhyde and the forces that motivate him to kill. An abused child, he fantasizes about becoming powerful, Blake's Red Dragon imagery an idealization, killing to retroactively act out against a domineering grandmother. Yeah, the domineering grandmother. It's a cinema cliche, and is expressed no better or worse than in any other film, but Red Dragon does manage to create a plausibly motivated creature out of Dollarhyde, so we'll run with it.

Dollarhyde is a perfect image of emerging male sexuality. He sees himself as an undesirable misfit, ostracized from society. We've got to assume that he's a virgin, outside the context of whatever impulses he inflicts upon his victims. He uses violence, imagery and the act of seeing to attain a measure of sexual power - all plausible links to pornography and the media depiction of sexuality. When at last he meets a woman willing to take him for who he is, Dollarhyde encounters a dilemma; all this time he's been murdering to attain personal and sexual power, and suddenly, he doesn't have to do it anymore. A woman he's attracted to returns his affections, rendering moot everything he's done up until this point. Yet he watches pornography as he has his first sexual relationship with her. Can these two sexual ideas co-exist, the 'real' and the pornographic? Which does he prefer? This is strong stuff, but Ratner and Tally don't know how to handle it once the ideas are out there. Instead, they take the easy road, cutting back to a funny scene with Lecter, who's been downgraded to comic relief through social assimilation. (For a good example of this refer to the scene in the gym, in which Lecter lunges freely at Graham before being pulled up short by a chain, or puppet string, that extends into the sky.)

Ratner tries to force Ralph Fiennes into a stony serial-killer facade, but he breaks through it whenever possible, particularly in scenes with Emily Watson. The two have a disquieting chemistry; one of the liveliest scenes in the film plays in Dollarhyde's living room, as the two tighten their sexual orbits around one another before a series of locked-off camera angles. Their two performances are the best in the film, and it's nothing but a shame that Ratner and Tally choose instead to enact more funny but pointless scenes with Lecter.