MANHUNTER: THE FINAL CUT Review: Michael Mann's Masterpiece Receives a Much Anticipated 4k Upgrade

 

Released in the summer of 1986 to critical disapproval and audience disinterest, filmmaker Michael Mann’s Manhunter, the first — and inarguably best — adaptation of Thomas Harris’s bestselling 1981 novel, “Red Dragon," almost immediately saw a turn in its fortunes.

 

VHS renters discovered and gloried in Manhunter’s hallucinatory mix of frequent Mann collaborator Dante Spinotti’s neon-drenched visuals; The Reds and Michel Rubini's moody, synth-flavored soundtrack; and grimly compelling subject matter: The pursuit of Tom Noonan’s terrifying, if still all-too-human, family killer, Francis Dollarhyde, by a desperate FBI and the ex-retired agent, Will Graham (a never-better William Petersen), before he strikes again. 

 

Much like another singularly divisive film, Blade Runner, four years earlier, Manhunter didn’t just fare poorly with general audiences at the time, but with film critics who dismissed Mann’s follow-up to The Keep and Miami Vice as “style over substance,” in part due to what many considered its borderline exploitative, lurid subject matter best left to the grindhouse, not the first-run theaters or even the arthouse. 

 

But that disreputable reputation and/or critical dismissal led directly to VHS rentals and sales. Home viewers wanted to see an entry in the horror-themed serial killer sub-genre, something closer to the slashers that filled movie theaters and videostore shelves.

 

What they saw and heard, however, was something altogether different, if not necessarily better (a value judgment best left for another time), and with it, a richer, more textured, ultimately provocative experience, one in which Mann, a tirelessly obsessively filmmaker who spent three years researching and refining the screenplay, dared to ask audiences to sympathize, if not entirely, empathize with a tragic figure, an emotionally scarred killer only introduced in the second hour. 

 

That identification with Noonan’s Dollarhyde, however, occurs long before he physically appears. In one of the most canny moves made by a filmmaker working within the genre, Mann erases the distinction between killer and audience in the first moments: Obsessed with seeing, Dollarhyde records everything, including the moments before and after he enters the homes of the victims, usually a family of four or five or six, and murders them as the catalyst for a distorted fantasy-dream life. 

 

Ending the prologue on a sudden, inescapably horrifying moment (seconds before a murder), Mann doesn’t so much switch perspectives as flattens them, privileging Peterson’s Graham, an ex-criminal profiler who once, in a previous life that led to his retirement, captured Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox). His encounter with Lecktor left Grissom not only with physical injuries, but emotional and psychological ones. In an about-to-become-a-cliche development, Grissom’s ability to dive headfirst into his subject’s disturbed mind has left long-standing, if unseen, scars, up to and including Graham questioning his own humanity, and his own propensity for violence (or worse). 

 

But with two families dead and Dollarhyde working on an admittedly convenient lunar cycle, Graham unretires, leaving a wife, Molly (Kim Greist), and son, Kevin (David Seaman), behind on the sandy Florida beach he called home. Spurred by his former supervisor, Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina), with promises of a consultant-only role, free of the dangers inherent in field work, Graham grudgingly accepts, his duty to the common good (public safety) superseding his responsibilities to his family.

 

Rather than criss-cross or interweave Graham’s pursuit with Dollarhyde’s preparations for the next family, Mann centers the first hour exclusively on Graham as he visits the site where Dollarhyde murdered the second family, Graham’s accelerating integration of Dollarhyde’s perceptual preconceptions (e.g., spying on the family from a nearby tree), a walkthrough the murder scene(s) that becomes all the more chilling as Graham, tape recorder in hand, methodically revisits Dollarhyde’s actions, from the first murder (the husband and father, the greatest physical threat) to the easiest (the children), and eventually, Dollarhyde’s exit, sight unseen by neighbors and acquintances. 

 

Graham’s insights lead to the first clues, the first steps towards identifying Dollarhyde’s identity and location, but even then, Graham senses that only a sit-down with the currently incarcerated Lecktor can help overcome any remaining mental blocks. It’s the first time we see Lecktor (spelled differently here for no apparent reason) on-screen, and despite Anthony Hopkins' Oscar-winning turn five years later, it’s no less chilling. Cox brings a low-level intensity to his performance as the fictional cannibal, going small where Hopkins would later go big to critical acclaim. 

 

Mann smartly decided to keep his Lecktor offscreen for most of Manhunter’s running time. He appears in only three scenes, but like Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, Lecktor leaves an eerily unshakable impression, both in the scenes with Graham and in the actions he takes, mostly, if not entirely, driven by frustration and malice over Graham’s discovery and capture of the good doctor (an insult to his superior intelligence), to connect Dollarhyde, a fervent, avid fan, and Graham’s family. 

 

The entrance of Dollarhyde proper occurs relatively late in Manhunter, and when it does, especially in the form of the late Noonan, a near-giant with a soft, gentle voice, raises not just the proverbial stakes, pushing the film closer to its conclusive confrontation between Graham and Dollarhyde, but against all expectation, allows the audience, however briefly, to see the tortured human being behind the monster, a human being driven by a desperate loneliness, an inability to connect, and an anguished discomfort with his own body and appearance. 

 

It’s rare too, for a late-arriving monster or villain to get a potential love interest, but that’s exactly what Dollarhyde gets in the second hour of Manhunter, Reba (Joan Allen), a blind co-worker who warms to Dollarhyde’s reserved, introspective manner. Their relationship isn’t meant to last (what does?), but it adds a welcome layer of complexity to what could — and would — have been an otherwise flat, one-dimensional character.

 

Dollarhyde’s overwhelming desire for genuine connection and his inability to make said genuine connection become the tragic flaw that defines and dictates his actions, right through Manhunter’s final, excruciatingly tense moments, a showdown exhilaratingly scored to Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

 

For the much-anticipated “final cut,” Mann closely supervised a fresh edit, tweaked a handful of scenes to increase psychological depth and suspense, revisited the color grading, remastered the audio into a 5.1 mix, and otherwise prepared a once-dismissed, now justly well-respected 4k edition of a film some, including this writer, consider Mann’s not just one of several masterpieces in his filmography, but most likely, his best.