This could be one of those rare and terrifying serial killer cases where the psychotic culprit apparently intends to bore and embarrass everyone to death with bad acting. Anthony Hopkins – in full reptilian ham mode, doing the quiet sonorous voice and musing smile as if tactfully suppressing entirely justified triumph at how much wiser he is than everyone else – plays John Clancy, a troubled psychic who used to help the FBI with murder cases and is now tempted out of retirement.
Colin Farrell, low of brow, dilated of pupil, plays the murderous wacko repeat offender who has something crucial in common with his pursuer, and Abbie Cornish is the young officer who regards Hopkins with the same sort of awe that Jodie Foster managed in The Silence of the Lambs so many years ago. It’s almost exotically ridiculous. Hopkins’s longtime FBI colleague, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, keeps sentimentally telling the old boy what a lovely smile he has. Actually, that bizarrely menacing rictus is just another reminder of Dr Lecter.
