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Quotes

Will Graham: I thought you might enjoy the challenge. See if you're smarter than the person I'm looking for.

Hannibal Lecter: Then by implication, you think you're smarter than I am, since it was you who caught me.

Will Graham: No. I know I'm not smarter than you.

Hannibal Lecter: Then how did you catch me?

Will Graham: You had...disadvantages.

Hannibal Lecter: What disadvantages?

Will Graham: You're insane.

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Mistakes

When Ralph Fiennes is in the Brooklyn museum, and hits the woman showing him the painting, over the head, you hear the sound before he actually hits her. See more...

Trivia

Frankie Faison reprises his role as Barney from "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Hannibal." He is the only actor to appear in all four Hannibal Lecter films, having played Lt. Fisk in "Manhunter." See more...

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Red Dragon (2002) - 27 corrections

Directed by Brett Ratner, starring Anthony Heald, Anthony Hopkins, Edward Norton, Emily Watson, Frankie Faison, Harvey Keitel, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ralph Fiennes (add more)

Genres: Crime, Drama, Thriller

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "edit" under an entry, then choose "correct entry". You can also submit corrections for corrections, if you think a mistake has been unfairly removed.

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This error applies to the DVD version of the movie. When reading the Lecter case files in the special features section, the dates in which the events of the movie take place are all in the 1970's. However, the movie says that they occur in the 1980's. Which is it? [DVD special features are not part of the film and so mistakes in them are not applicable. In any case, this is a question, not a mistake.]
Edit Corrected by jhoffman100@yahoo.com
When Mr. Chilton and the staff are going over Dr. Lecter's room, the latter pokes fun at Mr. Chilton regarding some rejection slip to the Archives. Chilton, not amused, orders Lecter's toilet seat removed. Later on, when Will Graham visits Lecter, the toilet seat is still there. [Either Chilton was just threatening Lecter, he changed his mind, or enough time had passed that the punishment was over.]
Edit Corrected by jhoffman100@yahoo.com
True to the novel Hannibal persists in asking Graham, on his asylum visits, how he managed to catch him. However, the film's departure from the novel, i.e. the opening scene in Venice (presumably added in order to increase the role of Hannibal in this prequel to the hugely successful Silence of The Lambs), makes that a silly question. He was getting closer but Graham had no idea who was responsible for Hannibal's series of murders until he "confessed" it for himself with his knife attack on Graham. [That's totally untrue. Graham was figuring it out looking at the diagrams and photos in Lecter's office and Lecter realized it, so he attacked him, hoping to murder him and keep him quiet. He just didn't know exactly what had tipped him off, so he persists in asking what mistake of his made Graham figure it out.]
Edit Corrected by White Lock Time
It is said that they found out that the dead body is not Dolarhyde because of DNA tests; however, DNA couldn't be taken in those days. [This film is set a 'few years' before the events of 'Silence of the Lambs' and as noted elsewhere appears to be set in 1988. The first paper suggesting DNA 'fingerprinting' as a method of identification was published in 'Nature' in 1984. DNA identification was first used in a criminal case in the UK in 1985 and in the US (in a rape case in Orange County, Florida) in 1986, years before the events of this film.]
Edit
Dolarhyde pours a flamable liquid onto the floor of his house and creates a brilliant fire with ceiling-high flames and absolutely no smoke whatsoever. A real fire would have blackened the top half of the room during the minute or so it took him to fake his suicide after lighting the fire. [Some flammable liquids burn with very little smoke. We don't know exactly which liquid he used.]
Edit
The Toothfairy case is supposed to take place a few years after Hannibal is caught. When Will takes his shirt off and his scar is visible, the scar is still fresh. You can tell by the color of it. [You can't really tell much about the age of a scar from the colour. People heal differently, and some will get scarred much easier than others. I have a scar from childhood that looks like it happened a month ago.]
Edit
Will is teaching his wife how to shoot a gun. However, they are standing on a distance of about 30m from the target. When I was learning how to shoot when I was an MP we never shot from a bigger distance than 10m, since the gun isn't accurate enough to shoot bigger distances. [I have seen military pistol ranges with targets out to 50 meters. Not easy, but it can be done.]
Edit
In the scene where the Dragon sets the ring of fire, he fires a shot and Emily is covered in blood. During the whole scene, Ralph (the man who is shot) is nowhere to be found, despite several wide shots of the fire being lit. How did the Dragon pull him through the fire, hold him up, and then shoot him in the head without moving out of the room? [It's possible that Dolarhyde already had Ralph's body in the room, someplace strategically hidden (i.e. in the room, but not in a place that is easily visible to the audience).]
Edit Corrected by Cubs Fan
During the opening credits, one of the newspaper headlines reads "FBI Agent in Extremely Critical Condition". The story under the headline says that "local police found Dr. Hannibal Lecter fatally wounded in his Chandler Square residence", and that "the call was made by Special Agent Will Graham of the FBI". Neither was true since Lecter lived and Graham went unconscious after the stabbing. [Yeah, sure, because newspapers are never wrong.]
Edit Corrected by RJR99SS
Why does Dolarhyde's house explode suddenly when it's on fire? It's not as if he keeps vats upon vats of chemicals or gases in there. It's just a cinematic effect to look cool. It should just keep burning steadily without exploding. [In the book, his safe is full of explosives. I can't recall if there was some visual reference to this in the movie.]
Edit
In the scene where Ed Norton is teaching his wife to shoot, there is absolutely no muzzle blast as she takes each shot. Muzzle blast is always present when a gun is fired. [I assume by muzzle-blast you mean the flash at the end of the barrel. No gun produces a muzzle-blast with every shot. Also the flashes are often not visible on film because of the way film picks up light. Many films add flash with optical/computer effects or pyrotechnics to make it easier to pick up on film.]
Edit
When Ralph Fiennes has Emily Watson in his house, and he is going to shoot her and then himself, he decides he can't kill her. You assume he's shooting himself, and we hear a shot, and see blood splatter all over Emily. He instead shot the man he'd already killed earlier in the day. A dead body doesn't leave a blood splatter - if the heart isn't pumping blood, it can't splatter. [There's still blood in the arteries of the body, it'll still leave splatter from the force of the gunshot. Furthermore, the body has been dead less than an hour, so there hasnt been any time for the blood to congeal either.]
Edit Corrected by RJR99SS
Lounds has to read out a text written by the Red Dragon. First off, there are things in the text which the Red Dragon didn't know about when he wrote the piece. For instance, the fact that Lounds wrote the article on police order. Second, after Lounds read the text he talks to the Red Dragon, stating he wants to understand. After that he screams in pain as he gets his tongue (?) bitten out. The problem is, that on the tape the police receive, the text that Lounds had to read out loud and Lounds' screams are right after one another, without the spoken words in between, where he states that he wants to understand. [The tape was stopped when the Red Dragon was talking, and then restarted before the reporter said "Hello". This was to stop the police from identifying who is the Red Dragon.]
Edit
The coroner identifies Ralph's body as Dolarhyde because Dolarhyde's dentures are in his mouth. To fit the dentures into the corpse's mouth would require knocking/pulling out Ralph's existing teeth, which any coroner would be able to tell would have been done post-mortem because Ralph's gums would not have had time to close and heal over. [The fire would have burnt the corpse to a crisp and would have made it hard for the coroner to tell, but it is irrelevant since they went with D.N.A. and found that the tooth fairy was still alive.]
Edit Time
At the start of Red Dragon,Will seems to be having a hard time tracking down the killer or understanding that the killer is in fact the good Doctor. Surely he would have had a full statement from Mason Verger,the only surviving victim of Hannibal the Cannibal,a 'fact' later established in Hannibal.If Mason survived,why doesn't Will know about it? [Because it's likely that Verger was still undergoing treatment for his horrific injuries. Also, Mason actually cut his own face off and semi-hung himself, Lecter might have encouraged this behaviour but that was the height of his involvement; he never tried to eat him. Remember in Hannibal, Verger isn't trying to get the police to catch Lecter and punish him, he is organising it himself so it's quite possible this was also running through his mind earlier on.]
Edit Corrected by David Mercier
The text of Hannibal Lecter's message to the Tooth Fairy is "Graham home: Marathon, Florida. Save yourself. Kill them all." Sans spacing and punctuation, the message is 48 characters in length. Lecter's message in the Tattler listed only 47 Bible verses (line/letter pairs). Perhaps Dr. Lecter can't spell "Florida." [When they read out the message they say "Gr'ham home: Marathon, Florida. Save yourself. Kill them all," distinctly missing the "a" out of Graham's surname when it's pronounced. It is quite possible that Lecter did this as well in order to make it fit his code.]
Edit Corrected by David Mercier Time
Will Graham finally figures out how the Tooth Fairy knows the inside of the Jacobi house by realising the Chromalux name printed on the videotape box is the video transfer company. But given that he spent a lot of time reviewing the tapes, didn't he notice the Leeds family also had a video made by the same company? Why didn't he notice the Chromalux name on their video too? How could he have missed the connection? [He never saw the Leeds' family tape, since it was taken by Mr. Leeds' son (the one from his first marriage). Actually, after having his "insight", Graham has to ask an investigator about the list of objects taken by Leeds' son - and that's when he discovers the Leeds also had a tape.]
Edit Corrected by cinecena
When Dolarhyde fires the shotgun in his house, blood spatters on Reba's face. When this happens, Reba is sitting in the middle of the couch, and there is an end table with a phone on it between her and Dolarhyde. You'd think at least some of the furniture would get blood on it too, but as the camera pulls back, we see there is no blood anywhere on the couch, the table, or the side of the phone. [She is standing when blood spatters her, but then she falls back onto the couch. Also the blood was aimed at Reba, not the furniture.]
Edit
In the final shoot-out, Graham's gun appears to be a revolver. When he tells his wife to shoot Dolarhyde, the gun she picks up from beside her husband appears to be an automatic. [Will Graham has two pistols, a revolver and an automatic. When he gets his guns from the closet, you can see that he takes out two weapons.]
Edit
In the scene near the beginning of the film when Hannibal attacks Will, Will first holds a pistol, you can see the shell ejection port, but when he shoots Hannibal, he is using a revolver. [He originally pulled his semi-auto pistol but lost it while being stabbed. The revolver is his back-up that came from his ankle holster. ]
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