Sometimes a movie tries too hard.

Like everyone, I loved “Silence of the Lambs.” And I’m a fan of the follow-up, “Hannibal”, with its great “brain-eating scene.” (How could you not love a good (or even mediocre) brain-eating scene?) And, I appreciated the first time Hannibal Lector graced the screen, played by Brian Cox in Michael Mann’s “Manhunter” from 1986.

So I should have enjoyed “Red Dragon”, the 2002 prequel to the Anthony Hopkins Lector movies. (It’s effectively a remake of “Manhunter” being that they are both based on the same Thomas Harris novel.)

Yet I found it rather blah.

There’s some real acting chops at work here. Edward Norton stars as Will Graham, the male Clarice Starling prototype. Hopkins delights with his creepy schtick. Emily Watson evokes sympathy as an ingénue of the main baddie here, the Red Dragon serial killer. Harvey Keitel, Bill Duke, Philip Seymour Hoffman… it’s a cornucopia of top Hollywood talent.

Here’s the problem: before “Silence…”, serial killer movies were the domain of trash cinema. Wes Craven’s, “Last House on the Left” or John McNaughton’s “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” come to mind. It wasn’t a subject matter that directors shooting for awards would tackle. Recall that Hitchcock never won an Oscar.

(Well, that’s not quite true. Hitch won the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, which is an honorary Oscar, but not for any one picture.)

“Silence…” changed all that. Suddenly the bloody, the grisly, the perverted could be high, or at least commercial, art.

But upper-class yahoos always manage to suck the fun out of anything, including, it turns out, cannibalism and violence. “Red Dragon” just felt bland, like the work of some kid who thinks he’s being edgy when he’s not.

This is partly because there really isn’t much violence in the film. [Spoiler Alert] The serial killer’s victims have already died before the start of the movie’s main timeline. Any grisly imagery is basically just Edward Norton going into crime scenes blotted with blood. No people wearing faces or dicing up chunks of frontal cortices.

I also found the serial killer’s motivations unclear and just kind of dumb, like he was a mashed potato mix of Norman Bates, Buffalo Bill from “Silence…”, and various overdone serial killer archetypes.

It doesn’t help that the film was directed by (alleged) sex pest Bret Ratner.

See it if you must.