Jodie Foster is a smart woman. Legions of fans were disappointed when she bowed out of Ridley Scott's Hannibal, the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, but now that the film is out, they are more likely to applaud her decision.

Where the first movie was smart, suspenseful and subtle, the makers of Hannibal seem intent only on creating a massive gross-out. Man-eating pigs, ripped faces, torn bowels and the consumption of brains are only a taste of the platter Hannibal has to offer. What the film doesn't deliver, unfortunately, is a satisfying plot or interesting characters.

One of the biggest questions regarding this picture was whether Julianne Moore could appropriately fill Jodie Foster's FBI boots. She can, but screenwriters David Mamet and Steven Zaillian give her virtually nothing to do. Clarice Starling is now a cold, harsh and bitter woman plagued by failure as an FBI agent­­and she is not very interesting.

The film opens with a big FBI shootout that results with the death of a fellow agent, for which Starling is blamed. Amid the negative publicity and criticism from co-workers, including Paul Krendler (Ray Liotta), she receives new clues about Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) from his only surviving victim, the deformed Mason Verger (Gary Oldman, under mounds of makeup). Verger is a millionaire who will stop at nothing to see Dr. Lecter get his due.

Meanwhile, Lecter has made a nice home for himself in Florence, Italy, where Inspector Rinaldo Pazzi (an appropriately dry Giancarlo Giannini) recognizes him as one of the FBI's ten most wanted criminals and pursues the reward for identifying him. The film really heats up (and disgusts) when Lecter comes back across the Atlantic and comes into direct contact with Starling and Verger.

The climax, and everything else about the film, pales in comparison to the original. But what made Lambs so great was the dialogue between Starling and Lecter at his asylum. It not only creeped us out by revealing Lecter's bizarre tastes and desires, but also gave us a deep understanding of Starling and why she became an FBI agent. There is no such dialogue in Hannibal, and that results in minimal character development. We see what Clarice has become, but we don't really understand why. The old Clarice was fueled by determination, and without that she loses some of her charisma.

Hannibal Lecter, on the other hand, has lost his mystique. In Lambs, Lecter was at his most mysterious while locked up; we saw little of his free life and that contributed to our interest in his character. Now we see Lecter free as a bird, wandering around the streets of Florence. Somehow, seeing him shuffle around in his pajamas takes the fun out of it.

Hopkins, of course, can never play Lecter badly. He recites his lines with that same venomous bite that won him the Oscar. But Scott, Mamet and Zaillian have made him a caricature of his former self. His references to a "good meal" wear thin after a while, as do his attempts to kill people in the grossest way possible.

Moore is fine and probably would have been quite good in her part had she been given more interesting things to do besides sit at a desk for half of the film. Oldman and Liotta are also fine in their unsympathetic parts, but it is Giannini's Inspector Pazzi who emerges as the most interesting new character. At least he does something, which contrasts the rest of the picture and its pointless, circular plot that goes nowhere.

My biggest beef, pardon the expression, with the film is the excessive gore in place of suspense. We see heads torn open, stomachs ripped apart and other gruesome acts that cause Hannibal to drown in its own unpleasantness. In comparison, Lambs actually showed very little. Instead, it gave us heart-pounding suspense, great characters and dialogue, memorable one-liners and subtlety. Hannibal is an $80 million empty plate.