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Melania (2026)
Let’s tackle the reality that reviewing a documentary like Melania is practically beyond the point. This movie wasn’t created by artists who felt they had a compelling and insightful story to tell, a revelatory depiction of the human condition that would cause us all to sit back and reflect on ourselves. No, this movie was created to appease and suck up to one important orange-hued ticket-buyer. Amazon bought the rights to the movie for a staggering $40 million dollars, pledged an additional $35 million in marketing, and put out all the stops to open the documentary on the residing First Lady in 1700 screens nationwide. For those not in the know, documentaries are not big moneymakers; the highest-grossing doc of 2025 was Becoming Led Zeppelin at $16 million. Only thirteen documentaries have ever grossed over $70 million worldwide and only 39 have grossed more than $30 million. It’s hard to fathom that Amazon imagined this would become a runaway hit. They’re not that deluded. Think less of Melania as a documentary and more as a transparent corporate bribe by Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, who sure would like favorable consideration from the current administration that interferes in every facet of media to better protect the ego of a soon-to-be octogenarian who needs everyone to constantly be showering him with effusive adoration (le sigh). Welcome to our new American ecosystem, where all corporations are expected to bend the knee in fealty so as to procure favorable dispensation from a mad king always in need.
What is even the point of reviewing something like this? It’s so obviously manufactured in bad faith. Well, dear reader, I guess it comes back to my own martyr complex: I suffer so that you may be spared the same fate. Unless you’re a diehard MAGA member, Melania will be a torturously facile example of unserious people elevating other unserious people for an audience of the unserious to be patronizingly pat on the head and told that, yes, theirs is the true voice of America’s solemn destiny.
The film follows the 20 days before the second inauguration of Donald Trump as the American president. For those of you, especially in endangered minority communities, wondering what Melania Trump was going through when it came to designing the drapes and White House color patterns, fear not! Most of the movie is listening to Melania’s strained narration while we watch handlers and assistants flit about and primp the soon-to-be First Lady while handing her samples. Never has insider access felt so tedious!
Did I mention that this movie is directed by none other than Brett Ratner, disgraced filmmaker who was jettisoned from Hollywood as a Me Too reckoning following decades of harassment? Ratner has never directed a documentary before and it shows. Opening the doc with the Scorsese-esque notes from the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” feels like sacrilege. It’s even worse when played over the start of Melania strutting through her Mar-a-Lago mansion to a fleet of cars. It plays like self-parody but you know nobody has the awareness for that. Ratner asks her such incisive questions like, “What is your favorite recording artist?” like it’s a Tiger Beat interview. Late in the film, he’s heard on camera wishing the president “sweet dreams” in the most sycophantic voice. Really Ratner’s here like everyone else, seeing the craven opportunity to get into the good graces of the president. Ratner has been pushing to get Rush Hour 4 greenlit, a sequel that I don’t even think Chris Tucker (current age: 54) and Jackie Chan (current age: 72) are eager to launch. Not that it matters to Ratner, but it’s been almost TWENTY YEARS since 2007’s Rush Hour 3, which also featured a cameo by notorious sex pest Roman Polanski. Sure enough, in the wake of Melania’s release, Trump was pushing for a Rush Hour 4, as clearly the man whose brain is always stuck in the 1980s has his finger on the pulse of the cultural zeitgeist. All Ratner had to do was make a 100-minute fluff piece about the president’s third wife and, voila, one sexual predator in the highest office in the land can ensure that another sexual predator can get his dream project, which I repeat is depressingly Rush Hour 4, off the ground. Also recall that Ratner was literally seen canoodling on a couch with pal Jeffrey Epstein and a group of young women who were certainly there by choice. Ugh.
I actually think a figure like Melania could be an interesting subject for a hard-hitting documentary. The Slovenian model becomes the third wife to a notorious philanderer and crook, enough that he was famously having sex with adult film actress Stormy Daniels while Melania was recovering from the birth of their son. From the outside, this relationship appears entirely transactional, with Trump getting a new, younger, more desirable wife, though not desirable enough to stop having affairs with other women (note: this is a condemnation of Trump, not on any perceived shortcoming of Melania). For her, she gets the security of a man of riches and with that security is the tacit understanding that he can do whatever he wants and she will have to accept it. Getting an insider’s account of all the debauchery and debasement of being Trump’s current wife could be extremely insightful and would make Melania genuinely empathetic for one of the rare times in public life. Granted, she’s made her calculation and stood silent while her husband’s regime has terrorized millions at home and endangered the lives of millions abroad, so let’s cap that degree of empathy. Still, she has a perspective that could be very illuminating under the right circumstances. It’s just that we’ll never see that kind of perspective. It’s too off-brand. It goes against her agreement with the money-man. I don’t fault her for wanting to stay in her echelon of riches and comfort any more than I would, say, a duchess who prefers a pampered life to starving on the streets. I get it, but it doesn’t excuse the lasting damage of being the pursed-lip silent partner to a degenerate with total power. Imagine a documentary about Eva Braun but it’s all about her favorite throw pillows. Not exactly the most interesting angle to take for someone so close to such disruptive and systemic abuses of power.
I take particular umbrage with one angle the documentary takes, setting Melania up as a celebration of immigration, a reflection of the American Dream. It’s more than a little hypocritical for this movie to elevate the immigrant story of Melania while the administration of her husband is targeting anyone it deems insufficiently American, namely people of color regardless of their actual citizenship. When the government’s special masked police are rounding up indigenous people to deport to adhere to an unrealistic and damningly racist daily quota, you know they’re not targeting the “worst of the worst.” Are the “worst of the worse” the day care workers? The family-owned pizzeria? The spouses of American soldiers? Those seeking asylum from persecution and death from hostile governments? The immigrants who have navigated the byzantine system of immigration to become official citizens and who are abducted by ICE for appearing at their court appointments? To manufacture Melania as a symbol of the celebration of an immigrant’s journey is farcical when the Trump Administration is built upon the elimination of immigrants from every facet of society. It isn’t a coincidence that the administration has lowered immigration numbers to a paltry 7500 in 2025 and most of those are white South Africans. She’s quoted as saying, “No matter where we come from, we are bound by the same humanity.” Uh huh. Tell that to Stephen Miller and his dogged desire to Make America as Alabaster as Possible Again.
There’s just not enough material here to cover a feature film, which is why the shallow movie often feels like an overly padded infomercial propping up its star. There are long stretches where you’re just watching people walk or listen to performances. It’s filling time. The whole enterprise feels like you’re watching someone else’s lackadaisical wedding video. There are perhaps two or three memorable moments caught on camera. The first is Trump complaining that the college football championship game being held the same day as his presidential inauguration is a conspiracy against him. His reasoning is that they’ve had the inaugural date for “centuries.” The next is Melania turning the funeral of President Jimmy Carter into her own grief about losing her mother. Melania takes reverence walking through the halls of the Capitol, remarking about the military defending the rights of the Constitution, which is quite ironic considering Donald Trump fomented an insurrection that gleefully attacked police officers to try and overturn an election in defiance of the Constitution. There’s also the line from his inaugural speech that is particularly galling in 2026: “My proudest legacy will be that of a peace-maker and unifier.” Yes, surely history will remember Trump as an instrument of peace when he’s not bombing girls’ schools and pledging to annihilate civilizations as well as other blatant war crimes.
Rather than continue to tell you about the many creative and moral shortcomings of this enterprise, why not provide a sampling of some of the best critical hits on this movie? Here you go:
“I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.” – Xan Brooks, The Guardian
“To say that Melania is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies.” – Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter
“Melania the movie isn’t a documentary; it’s a protection racket.” -Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic
“A soothingly looped AI screensaver.” -Amy Noicholson, Los Angeles Times
“Call it a document, instead, of 20 days in the First Lady’s life circa January 2025, with all the weight and depth of a Post-it.” -Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence
“Ratner’s film plays like a gilded trash remake of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest in which a button-eyed Cinderella points at gold baubles and designer dresses, cunningly distracting us while her husband and his cronies prepare to dismantle the Constitution and asset-strip the federal government.” -Xan Brooks cooking again, The Guardian
Anyway, don’t watch Melania. I was never going to appreciate this movie. It was not made for me. It wasn’t made for you either. It wasn’t made for anyone but the First Lady, who had editorial control over the movie, so why would you expect anything other than a stage-managed image-consulted propaganda puff piece on her air of dignified grace and style? Hearing her somnambulant narration over her gilded life and the pageantry of a second inauguration of the most destructive president in American history, it’s enough to make you zone out. While wars are being waged, prices are soaring, neighbors are being rounded up into camps of concentration by masked goons, and corruption and graft reign supreme in a government run by the worst people imaginable, it’s hard not to find a soft-pedaled vanity project like Melania as an offense to the senses. If there are bigger wastes of time at the movies in 2026, it will be a truly hellacious year. This is not being best. This is not being best at all.
Nate’s Grade: F
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Hercules (2014)
What happens if you make a Hercules movie but take out all the unique things that make the classic hero who he is? Would he still be Hercules? This question is at the heart of director Brett Ratner’s newest film, and it’s better than expected, which is a nicer way of also saying it’s not as bad as it looked like in its terrible cheesy advertising. It might be the most entertaining Brett Ratner film yet for what that statement is worth.
So, who is this Hercules? Besides looking like The Rock, he’s a mercenary who leads a band of warriors that are carefully left out of those widespread tales of his heroics and derring-do. Hercules’ nephew (Reece Ritchie) is the mouthpiece for the group, spinning the tales into epic poetry. There’s also a female archer, a sarcastic second-in-command good with throwing knives, an animalistic swordsman, and an older spearman (Ian McShane) who is given fleeting prophetic images, mostly about his own death. There’s a reason these people aren’t described much beyond their character-defining weaponry. This gang is hired by Lord Cotys (John Hurt) to protect his people from a Thracian warlord who rumor has it is a centaur. Could he be? Have you been paying attention?
Depending upon your tastes, you may either find this new approach refreshing or feel completely ripped off. It does seem that all of those cool glimpses of Hercules going through his grueling trials, fighting giant beasts, doing generally Herculean acts, well it was all comprised to the opening two minutes, which is why I feel no spoiler guilt over revealing the true nature of the movie. It’s not really a Hercules film. Yeah, The Rock is just about the closest living example of a modern Hercules (he shouldn’t have the hobo beard, though), but it’s in name only. Whether this is a stopping point is up to the viewer. It does seem like a disappointing bait-and-switch to tease out what promises to be an epic with giant mythological beasts, and I feel like the audience has every right to be irritable they have been denied this. But if you move beyond this legitimate gripe, the resulting movie is actually serviceably entertaining, which again sounds like a backhanded compliment unless you remember how truly lousy it looked from its initial goofy trailer.
The plot is predictable at every step of the way, except one character I swore was going to be a backstabber due to pigeonhole casting surprised me when they turned out to just be another underdeveloped yet loyal sidekick. Other than that, and I apologize for the vagueness of that sentence, this is a movie you can accurately predict without having to even watch it. The mercenaries are hired for a cause, perhaps they’ll start feeling differently about what they’ve been called in to do, get more involved, and then oh no, perhaps the heroes and villains were all mixed up after all. The plot structure is at its most simplistic (mild spoilers, but really, come on): Act 1 break – they take the mission. Act 2 break – oh no, the guy was bad all along and they’ve been working for the wrong side. Act 3 is then essentially battle and vengeance against the true villains. There’s almost an admirable efficiency to its formula plot mechanics, including the tortured hero back-story over his slain family and the forced reveal of who was behind said slain family being slain. If you don’t want to overwhelm your brain, then Hercules will do.
Free of the rigors of being original or complex, the movie is open to accomplish its minimal goals of entertainment, and to this end I would call the movie a mild success. The action is involved just enough to keep things interesting, especially when Hercules and his battalion are beset on all sides by green-skinned guys who, for whatever reason, hid in holes in the ground. There’s a primal joy watching The Rock carry around a giant Captain Caveman-style club and gleefully beat people with it, especially when the recipients fly like 30 feet in the air. There’s a pleasure to be had with a stripped down and somewhat dumb action flick where everyone is running around in leather or loincloths. The action is more Hercules by way of Conan the Barbarian but without the monsters and sorcery. There’s a fun running gag where McShane’s character keeps thinking he’s come to his final moment, the death that has been prophesied, only to be denied it time and again, causing some slight frustration on his part. The pacing is also swift enough that you won’t be bored for long periods of time.
But at its heart, this is still a rather block-headed action film with questionable choices. While scrubbing the supernatural elements from the story, this still exists in the unbelievable world of Movie Land where the good guys can do anything. The archer never runs out of arrows. The good guys never miss. At one point, Hercules topples a 100-foot tall marble statue like he’s Samson. So even though it wants to be a more grounded take on the legend, it’s still filled with all that silly impossible action movie stuff we see all the time. Then there are just small impractical things that exist only for the fact that someone thought it looked cool. There’s a secondary villain (Peter Mullan!) who prefers to use a whip made of a spinal cord. This can work in one-on-one confrontations but in the open field of battle, with men churning all around, it seems like a rather poorly ineffective weapon. Lastly, there’s a trite message about the power of believing yourself. See, Hercules needs to believe he’s a worthy hero and he’ll rise to the occasion. All you have to do is believe in yourself and anything can happen… if you happen to be The Rock or look approximately like him.
This new spin on one of the oldest heroes is generally entertaining, that is, if you can accept the bait and switch of its premise, robbing Hercules of his godlike abilities. It’s like doing an action movie about Greek mythology but taking out all the mythology and just having a bunch of dudes poking each other with spears and swords. Actually, it’s exactly like that. With Ratner at the helm, you know there’s going to be a ceiling, but the film is so unabashedly clear with its simple intentions that I found it hard to grumble, and so just soaked up an average action adventure with one of the genre’s best leading men. As far as summer action vehicles go, it’s got just enough going for it, but see all the other good films first. Make a list. Check it twice.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)
The story behind the making of X-Men: The Last Stand is more interesting than most. Bryan Singer had directed the first two X-Men films and had done a fine job establishing many loveable characters and the universe that housed them. Warner Brothers has been trying to get their Superman franchise flying for so long, going all the way back to 1996 when Kevin Smith wrote the script, Tim Burton was to direct, and Nicolas Cage was going to be the man in tights. Since then directors and drafts of screenplays have come and gone, including Brett Ratner, best known for directing both Rush Hour movies and a slate of mostly mediocre movies. Then Warner Brothers poached most of the X-Men 2 team to make Superman Returns, hiring Bryan Singer as director, plus X2‘s screenwriters, cinematographer, editor/composer, and maybe even the cat that licked Wolverine’s claws. Fox was left without a captain for X-Men 3. They daringly picked Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake) but then he dropped out for family reasons. Then Fox went with their second choice … Brett Ratner. Both directors had essentially switched projects. Hollywood’s funny like that.
It’s been a few months since the events in X-Men 2. Scott “Cyclops” Summers (James Marsden) is still mourning the loss of his love, Jean Grey (Famke Jannsen), who sacrificed herself to save the rest of the X-Men. He’s tormented by her voice, whispering all around him and pleading with him to return to Alkali Lake, the site of her death. Miraculously, Jean returns from the dead but she’s much different. Her persona has broken and the Phoenix has taken over, a destructive killing force unparalleled on earth.
Magneto (Ian McKellen) has great use for such a force. There’s been news of a new drug that suppresses the gene that causes people to be born as mutants. This discovery has been dubbed a cure. The question persists, is should being different be curable and what would that even mean? Magneto sees the writing on the wall, knowing that any cure would only be voluntary for so long. He collects new mutant fighters along with his stalwarts the shape-shifting Mystique (Rebecca Romijn) and fire starter Pyro (Aaron Stanford), a former student at Xavier’s School for the Gifted.
Over at Professor X’s (Patrick Stewart) school, the mutant students are each questioning life with a cure. Rogue (Anna Paquin) is considering it so she can finally touch her boyfriend, Bobby “Ice Man” Drake (Shawn Ashmore) without killing him. Plus, so he’ll stop spending so much time with Kitty “Shadowcat” Pryde (Ellen Page), a girl who can walk through matter. Storm (Halle Berry) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) are left to run the team after some disastrous setbacks. Henry “Beast” McCoy (Kelsey Grammer) is a man covered in blue fur and appointed as head of Mutant Relations for the president. He senses the growing danger and anxiety the administration has with mutants and joins the X-Men to do what he feels is right.
It feels like that in a rush to production that character development, subtlety, and subtext were chucked out the window to make time for more boom-boom action. The first two X-Men flicks juggled the characters and introductions but still managed to squeeze in one great moment for the characters we cared about. The plot moved at a mature pace, insightful and touching on elements of psychology, politics, and personal struggles to fit into a society that fears you. There was some sophisticated, relevant stuff bandied about this franchise in between the kick-ass action. But with X-Men 3, you basically have Halle Berry doing less with more. She’s got more screen time, in part to her demands, and now she can use that extra time onscreen to show us how perfectly bland her character is as the film’s most laughable moral ideologue. The idea of a cure for the mutant gene is vastly interesting with all kinds of great avenues for character introspection and socio-political debate. But X-Men 3 renders all of its debate to be merely superficial, another in a series of plot points to get the action moving quicker.
The X-Men franchise was already overpopulated with lots of characters vying for screen time, so I don’t understand the decision to add even more characters to the ensemble and cut down the running time to a brisk 100 minutes. As a result, certain characters sit out for long stretches of the film, are inactive during key moments, some are mostly forgotten, or some meet unjustifiably hasty ends. If I was still an ardent comic book fan, and a follower of the X-Men, I might view the third film as heresy. Why even bother bringing the character of Angel into the movie if he’s just going to be on for two minutes, including a forehead-smacking deus ex machine moment? The Dark Phoenix storyline is the most pivotal storyline in the comic’s history, so why even bother dragging it into X-Men 3 if it’s just going to be Zombie Jean Grey? It feels like Ratner is off screen with a pole poking Janssen whenever the story needs her to wake up and stir up some stuff.
I hope comic fans enjoy the brief glimpses of some of their favorites, because X-Men 3 does a good job of throwing characters into a meat grinder. I had to check online to just to find out who they were, and even then my realization was followed by, “Her? Him? What?” And what the hell is up with Porcupine Face? That has got to be the worst mutant ability of all time. What’s he going to do to his enemies? “Hey, will you come a little closer. I have a secret to tell you. Closer … closer … closer still … that’s right, now please lean against my face.”
The movie trades character for action, so is the action even good? Ratner is a workmanlike director devoid of any personal style, which further brands X-Men 3 as ordinary. The action sequences aren’t anything extraordinary, there just happens to be more of them. The climax pits mutant against mutant in short-lived bursts. A battle between Ice Man and Pyro should be awesome, but Ratner stages the showdown like he was choreographing his neighbor’s kids. This battle lasts a whopping 45 seconds. The climactic end battle, the “war to end all wars,” is rather sloppy. Ratner keeps cutting back and forth between his pairing of Good mutant vs. Evil mutant (why do the two black girls seem forced to fight each other?), but his showdowns are all too quick to quicken the pulse. Wolverine’s brawls in the woods never rise up to the adrenaline-soaked fights in X-Men 2. The special effects and make-up are just as good; they’re just not being put to as good a use. If Ratner is going to dump character for action he has to make his action exceptional. The movie feels on autopilot.
Ratner is not fully to blame for the shortcomings of X-Men 3. Screenwriters Simon Kinberg and Zack Penn (Elektra) have crafted an overly rushed story that is more tailored for getting the job done than telling a good story. They present some big ideas and interesting elements, like a love triangle between Rogue-Ice Man-Shadowcat, but then most of the promise is either skipped over or dropped. They’re trying to juggle too many balls at once, and it just makes me miss Singer and the X2 screenwriters and how effective they were in defining character even in the smallest of moments. Some of the X-Men 3 dialogue is awfully stilted, like “You of all people know how fast the weather can change” and “Sometimes when you cage the beast, the beast gets angry.” There’s also a silly subplot about Storm teaching Wolverine what it means to be responsible. Try and count how many times you roll your eyes with that one. How many times are they going to have the president look blankly at a TV screen and gasp, “My god”? There’s some clever use of mutant powers during battles (mostly involving Shadowcat) but there’s just as many routine moments as well.
The acting is all over the map. Jackman owns his role as Wolverine. McKellen and Stewart bring a needed dose of grandeur to the proceedings. The X-kids are enjoyable, and Ellen Page (knocking ’em dead in Hard Candy) makes a very nice addition to the fold. I’ve likely enjoyed Paquin the most in this series, next to Jackman of course, so it’s so frustrating that she just plays Jealous Girlfriend at Window. I think it’s criminal how little she’s examined in the movie, especially since the supposed cure has the most questions and ramifications for her. Grammer is essentially Frasier in blue fur, but that’s essentially what Beast is so it works. He has a very nice moment when he sees what life would be like minus his mutant likeness. It’s really hard to judge most of the performances because of how short they appear in the movie.
X-Men: The Last Stand is far from boring but it’s more serviceable than special, and lacks the maturity and imagination that its previous films held. This was a franchise full of limitless potential, so to see it drop to something ordinary is sad, especially if this is the rumored end of the franchise (a record opening gross over Memorial weekend says otherwise). This franchise feels dumbed down; yes it’s still entertaining on a mass market level but it doesn’t have the creativity and precision that Singer’s movies had. X-Men 3 is fast-paced and not without its great geek moments, but it’s also the least emotionally involving of the films. When the deaths and departures come you’ll probably shrug your shoulders because of how the film presents them. X-Men 3 is fine, but I expect better from this franchise.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Red Dragon (2002)
The following is a conversation overheard between two studio producers:
Person #1: So this Hannibal movie made like a ton of green. What else can we do to squeeze out some more money?
Person #2: Hey, do you remember a movie called Manhunter based on the first Lector novel?
Person #1: Nope.
Person #2: That’s fine because nobody else does.
It’s official folks: Hannibal Lector, America’s favorite cannibal, is now more comical than scary. See the element that 1991’s Silence of the Lambs carried with it was a stealthily gripping sense of psychological horror. It hung with you in every closed breath you would take, surrounding you and blanketing your mind. I mean, there aren’t many serial killer movies that win a slew of Oscars. And while the follow-up, last year’s Hannibal, gleefully bathed in excess at least Ridley Scott’s sequel was so over-the-top with its Baroque horror that it was entertaining. So what’s Red Dragon, the latest Lector flick based on Thomas Harris first novel like? Well it’s like the bastard child of Lambs and Hannibal after a drunken one-night-stand neither would be proud of in the pale light of morning.
In an extended prologue we see the capture of the good doctor with a good appetite, Hannibal Lector (Anthony Hopkins, completing his trilogy of the character). FBI Agent Will Graham (Edward Norton) seeks his advice on a profile of a serial killer, not knowing that Lector more than fits the bill. A violent struggle ensues that leaves Graham with a long scar across his abdomen and Lector locked away for nine consecutive life sentences.
Turns out there’s another madman on the loose. The Tooth Fairy, dubbed by tabloid journalist Freddy Lounds (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), has butchered two families in their homes and inserted shards of broken mirror into their eyes. The FBI coaxes Graham out of retirement to try and track down the Tooth Fairy. But it seems in order to make any significant ground he must seek help from an old advisor – Hannibal Lector.
The crux of the film follows Graham’s attempts to figure out the identity of the Tooth Fairy, which we learn fairly fast is pretty boy Ralph Fiennes. Seems Fiennes has a cleft palette and years of physical and sexual abuse to toil over. He desires to transform into a mythical Chinese creature known as the Red Dragon. But wait, the lonely Fiennes is befriended by a lovely blind woman (Emily Watson) who identifies having people look differently at her. Can her affections melt the cold heart of a cold-blooded killer? Well, if they did thered be no other half of this movie.
What Red Dragon feels like is more of a checklist of what we expect to see in a Hannibal movie than anything of creative nourishment. It’s like a slimmer version of Lambs plot. Once again there’s an FBI agent who recruits Hannibal for advice on tracking down a serial killer. Once again there’s a disturbed killer trying to transform himself. Once again Hannibal Lector scares the crap out of anyone at will. Check, check, and check. Creative stagnation? Double check. The most disappointing aspect is the rudimentary feel this whole exercise has. Even though Red Dragon is a prequel it still seems like it’s begging to meet our expectations of two earlier films.
The first stab at the Red Dragon novel was in 1986 by director Michael Mann (Ali, The Insider) with the thriller Manhunter. William Peterson (before his work at CSI) was a more brooding Graham, Tom Noonan was a spookier Tooth Fairy, and the tension was stacked better. There were no comparative expectations.
Norton is the finest actor of his generation but has certain trouble breathing life into Graham. The character is far more straight-laced than what we’ve been told is an expert at delving into the minds of killers. Grahams relationship with Lector doesn’t have any of the complexity, or interest, that Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling had. He can even be very flat-footed in his detective work for a specialist. He stares at the home videos of the two slain families for about an hour wondering what the connection is while we in the audience shout it out to him. Lets go to the videotape Ed!
Anthony Hopkins returns as the devil in the flesh and seems to have another grand old time. Lector worked in Lambs because he was caged up, like a wild animal not meant for four glass walls. You never knew what would happen. He’d get in your head and he would know what to do with your gray matter — not that he didn’t have a culinary degree in that department with Hannibal. With Red Dragon, Hannibal is just window dressing to another serial killer. He’s a supporting character in a story that he has nothing to do with. He’s reduced to comic relief with his sudden attacks of chattering teeth and velvety voice. The amazing supporting cast of actors all do well, especially the beaming Watson who will shine in anything you put her in. Just try.
Ultimately the story of Red Dragon is far from flawless and meanders for quite a while. It would have been a marginally competent movie had it not been trying to replicate Silence of the Lambs so damn hard. So, is this the last youll see of Hannibal Lector? No as long as clinging cash registers can still be heard. Cue evil laughter.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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The Family Man (2000)
If I poked this movie it would spray sap in my eye and blind me. It’s essentially a Hollywood remake of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life with a bit more cynicism and a bit less success. Cage is a heartless Wall Street whiz who catches a “glimpse” of an alternative life where he’s married to Tea Leoni and has kids in the suburbs. The Family Man wants to kill you with its message of “business is EVIL” and “suburbs and mini-vans and bowling leagues and family… good!” It’s almost caveman like in its bludgeoning. Sap flows freely in this supposed feel-good flick, but stalls in a lackluster ending.
Nate’s Grade: C
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