I cannot believe, for a second, that Hannibal Lector could fool anyone into thinking he was another person by placing his face on his own. This is absurdly ridiculous. There would be a clear line where the new face stops! EMT’s would check for vitals, and surely notice a fake face! How could anyone let that small, crappy part of the movie in? There must have been another way to let him escape. Ugh.
Hey, cutting off somebody else’s face and slapping it over your own worked in “Face-Off” so well that nobody even noticed how different Travolta’s body was from Cage’s! So, why wouldn’t it work for Lecter?
Seriously, while I enjoyed SOTL, for the most part, almost everything in it (and ABSOLUTELY everything in the other two Lecter movies) was utterly implausible.
No sorry. Made sense to me.
Not because he made himself look like Office Whathisface (aptly named under the circumstance). But because
A. He looked slightly like Office Whathisface if his face had been all chopped up and no one could bear to look at it for very long.
and more importantly
B. They weren’t studying his face (even if they could stomach it), they were taken in by the fact that he was in the guy’s uniform lying on the ground, while they were assuming Lecter up and trying to escape. Basic misdirection.
oh, and
C. General panic.
I thought it was brilliant.
Oh and…they did check for vitals, and of course he was able to regulate his to match someone horrible attacked…which you could call implausable (because it is) but then it was established as part of his caracter.
And I can believe, being primarly concerned with vitals, the EMS are not going to mess with his destroyed face much.
I’m amazed that Lecter managed to get this all done rather quickly:
*Killed two officers. Cut off one guy’s face with excellent precision and diembowled and arranged the other one to hang high up on his cage like a crusifixion.
*Switched costumes with the face-less guy.
*Stowed the face-less guy up on the elevator. Messed with the elevator to catch everybody’s attention.
*Arranged himself on the floor with the face on him and managed to get his vitals to match someone near-death.
And all in a short amount of time! Of course he must have been thinking of this ever since he was told he was going to Tennessee.
Pembry and the other officer were the guards stationed on that floor to guard him, and they had just brought him a dinner…one might surmise that until his dinner tray was ready to be brought back down[or they were to call to have someone come up to get it] that they were to just hang there and guard him. The cops on the first floor lobby weren’t expecting anything which is why they were so nonplussed about the elevator moving around. It could have been an hour after the meal was taken up, and you can do a lot in an hour. He might have had more than an hour, but probably the guards upstairs checked in hourly, or someone from below would go up hourly to check [if I had Hannibal the Cannibal upstairs, I would have the actual floor guards checked hourly just to make sure he was behaving…]
Hannibal was acting like a perfect gentleman, so it was calm and peaceful up until the fecal matter hit the rotational cooling device.
We need a doctor’s input about the vitals. I think that given the emergency situation, Hannibal was able to put a lot past the guards and EMS folk. They’re expecting the “cop” to be the victim and so anything they see is based around that fact. “Vitals normal? Gee, that’s good. I think we’ll save him.” In fact, just before Hannibal unmasks, the EMS is relaying his vitals and has to repeat them to the hospital, as if they’re not the kind of stats he would normally encounter in such a case.
As for the guards, the movie shows them as inattentive and sort of slacking off, which gives Hannibal plenty of opportunity for mischief.
Do you think when he was driving away in the ambulance, Hannibal lit up a big stogie and and said, “I love it when a plan comes together.”?
I agree this ingenious escape is at the very least slightly implausible, but I don’t think it matters at all. It makes for a darn good story, which is what Harris was trying to deliver and what I wanted to read. Incidentally, I think it’s handled better in the book than it is in the movie.
Well, heck. That’s all I ever think about doing in Tennessee!
Knoxville! Knoxville! Knoxville!
I dunno - I didn’t find that part particularly implausable. Remember - his whole head was a disgusting, bloody mess - I don’t imange medics would be poking around in what they think is a hole in someone’s face, just to see if it’s actually a fake face, if you know what I mean.
Also, I didn’t think his escape was executed particularly quickly - quickly in movie time, but not in real time.
YMMV. 
Wasn’t there a scene where the EMT knelt down to his face, and he started jerking his whole body to simulate going into convulsions, so they rushed him into the ambulance?
The most implausible aspect for me about his escape was that he didn’t immediately to Agent Graham’s house and kill them all. Did he just let it go after Dollarhyde failed?
Less unbelievable than you think. I’ve seen magicians pull the stopped pulse trick in under 30 seconds.
Harris never got too detailed about what happened to Graham after “Red Dragon” except that he was a total mess. Possibly insane, but we do know he was an alcoholic. Besides, for all we know, that was just one of many things Lecter planned on doing when he returned to the States after his stay in Italy in “Hannibal”. In “Silence…” it would have been unwise to go to Graham’s house, as Lecter only cared about escape. He didn’t want to attract attention to himself.
Re: my last post. Thanks! I wasn’t sure how much time had passed between killing the cops and the cops downstairs checking it out. And I realize now that earlier, Chilton told the story of how when Lecter ripped out the nurse’s tongue years ago, “his pulse never got above 80”. Chilton is compelled to tell this story at least several times in the first two books.
After getting everything ready, Lector also had to fire two rounds, get the gun at least out of plain sight, and then get back into position with *Sgt. Pembry’s face in place before the SWAT team arrived.
(This is not a complaint – I love all three books, and I read very little fiction).
Regarding the plausibility of the EMTs spotting the ruse: describing the escape to Clarice after the fact, Crawford stressed that the EMTs did what they were trained to do – slap on the IVs, etc.
[Hannibal hijack] Does anyone know anything about the ‘suicide of Edgar Bolger’ alluded to in the book Hannibal? I assumed it was a real-life event, but all my searches turn up nothing.[/Hh]
- IIRC, it’s ‘Sergeant’ Pembry in the movie, but ‘Officer’ Pembry in the book.
Molly: “Did you visit your friend in the refrigerator?”
Will: “I had a couple.”
I didn’t get the idea he was an alcoholic.
Insane, perhaps, certainly able to understand those who were.
I think the important take on that was when Lecter asked Will what advantage he had Will responded “You were insane”.
Did any of you get the impression that Molly left him afterwards?
What happened to Will was mentioned very briefly in the begining of the novel “Silence of the Lambs”.