I really wanted to like this movie. In my opinion Brett Ratner and Ted Tally did a second rate job of bringing the story from print to screen. Everything in this movie is muffin top, with no actual muffin. The duo did a wonderful job of including practically every scene from book to film, but along the way lost everything that made these scenes make sense. Nothing is explained, no motivations are explored, and characters are so thin that they are barely recognizable beyond the basic Killer, FBI agent, scummy reporter icons. This is a common danger of transferring a book to screen (too much info, not enough time to convey it); there is an art to it, and this time Ratner and Tally are merely drawing stick figures. To compound the problem, both have chosen to beef up Hannibal Lector's on screen time, which not only does not mirror the book, it takes away from the suspense of the actual plot. The best example I can give is that Ratner and Tally have chosen to include lengthy scenes including Reba, a blind woman, touching a tiger as it's under anesthesia, going so far as to include her cupping the tiger's genitals, yet they give no reason for why the characters are in this situation in the first place. In the movie it comes off as merely aesthetic and pointless to the plot (in the book it is very important to the plot). Most everything in the movie comes off this way. Another example is the motivation behind the main killer, who suffers from a cleft palate, which is not pointed to in the movie, though the character in the movie has the scar, e.g. all muffin top, no muffin.