Why a movie Gerard Butler didn’t even like left him feeling “touched by God”
As much as we all love Gerard Butler, he hasn’t always made the right choices.
For all the success he’s found with 300 and the How to Train Your Dragon franchise, his filmography is littered with some truly cataclysmic duds. Terrible action movies, stomach-churning romcoms, disaster movies with an emphasis on the word ‘disaster’. Then there’s Movie 43, which… You know what, I’m not even going to get into that now.
To give the Scotsman some credit, he isn’t the only one to make a bad film. According to an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Reddit, Butler recalled going to watch a film which he didn’t like. Yet, somehow, it still managed to leave a divine impression.
“I was filming in Dublin, and I went to see Hannibal the movie, which I didn’t particularly enjoy, but when the music came on at the end, I felt like I had been touched by God,” he said. “I went straight to Virgin Records and bought the CD, and took it home, and played it all night, and the next day the landlord came up to say hello – not to complain – and I said, ‘You have to listen to this.’ And I played it for him, and he said, ‘Jesus! That’s Patrick Cassidy! He used to live in this apartment!’ And it turns out that Patrick Cassidy had rented the exact same apartment that I was living in.”
Hannibal, the strange sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, saw Ridley Scott grab the almost cursed responsibility of adding to something that was already brilliant. In a bizarre turn of direction (that inevitably led to it shitting the bed), it frames the infamous cannibal in a heroic light, depicting a battle with a former victim to save the life of Clarice Starling. Jodie Foster was unable to reprise her role, so Julianne Moore plays the part instead. The character of Mason Verger, a child molester whom Dr Lecter brutally disfigured, is played by Gary Oldman, whose name was initially omitted from the movie’s credits.
While the official music credit for Hannibal goes to Hans Zimmer, Verger’s dedicated theme was based on a piece by Irish composer Patrick Cassidy. Titled ‘Vide Cor Meum’, this aria was blended with the words of a sonnet by the Italian writer Dante. Lecter actually attends a performance of the sonnet in the movie. As the film progresses and Verger’s plans become more and more twisted, his theme takes on an increasingly darker tone to signify his perverse descent.
As good as its music might have been, most viewers shared Butler’s opinion on Hannibal as a whole. It wasn’t slated by critics – unlike some of its follow-ups – but critics deemed it to be a significant downgrade from its predecessor. In all honesty, it never stood a chance. The Silence of the Lambs took the world by storm, and too many of its key components were missing from the sequel. At least Scott is a fan, once referring to it as a “thinking man’s scary movie”.
As Butler alluded to, you can usually find at least one good thing about even the very worst film. Except for Movie 43. There is nothing to celebrate about that travesty.
