As a pop-culture character, the FBI psychological profiler has played itself out. It was a novel idea when Thomas Harris introduced it to readers in his 1981 Red Dragon, and when writer/director Michael Mann introduced it to filmgoers in his 1986 movie adaptation of that novel, Manhunter. Since then, however, the character has become a cliché in countless serial-killer movies, a device whose pretense of exploring the psychological underpinnings of evil has been reduced to an excuse for baroque directorial flourishes that æstheticize violence and rob it of moral weight. The nadirs of this trend were 2000’s The Cell and 2001’s Hannibal, the latter adapted from the third book in Harris’s Hannibal Lecter trilogy into a movie that seemed to agree with its psychopathic protagonist’s elevation of taste and style over morality.

With the new film version of Red Dragon, however, comes a retrenchment. This latest entry still lacks the heart of The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme’s 1991 movie version of the second Lecter novel, which managed to find humanity in its killers, sleuths, and victims alike. Director Brett Ratner, who’s best known for the Rush Hour action comedies and the gloppy Christmas movie Family Man, isn’t the guy to look to for such sympathy or emotional depth. But he’s also not a director given over to empty gestures of style and vision. All he wants to do is build an entertaining scare machine, and that’s a relief.

Likewise Anthony Hopkins, in his third go-round as Lecter, is now no more interested in digging up new psychological insights into his character than, say, Robert Englund was the sixth time he played Freddy Krueger. Although the story requires Lecter to be a bit younger, angrier, and more impatient, viewers know the character too well by now to find anything he does surprising. So Hopkins has pared his performance to a minimum; every once in a while he pops up, delivers a patented quip or jolt, and exits before he can wear out his welcome.

In fact, the most surprising thing about Red Dragon is how subtle and spare it is. The pre-credit sequence, which tells us how FBI profiler Will Graham (Edward Norton) captured Lecter, is a model of narrative economy. (Credit should probably go to screenwriter Ted Tally, who won an Oscar for his adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs.) The movie uses similar quick strokes in its portrayal of Graham’s chief quarry, serial killer Francis Dolarhyde (Ralph Fiennes). It hints at an abused childhood and other inspirations for his murderous Red Dragon alter ego, but it doesn’t spell everything out in the dully literal fashion of most serial-killer movies that leave nothing to the viewer’s imagination and insist on a reductively oversimplified link between the killer’s pathology and his wounded inner child. Fiennes’s chilling, measured performance suggests a secret complexity to Dolarhyde that’s not easily explained away by childhood traumas; as the Red Dragon insists, he is very much his own creation.

Manhunter was a more stylish film, but it was also richer in its psychology, as it tried to imagine what it would be like for Graham (William L. Petersen, now a detective on TV’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation) to think like a killer. (Mann seemed less interested in the minds of the killers themselves; his Lecter, played by Brian Cox, was almost an afterthought.) Norton’s Graham has fewer flashes of insight. Hopkins’s Lecter keeps trying to taunt him by citing the similarities between their lethal imaginations and suggesting that Graham may bear a moral responsibility for indirectly goading Dolarhyde to kill again, but Graham will have none of it. Norton walks briskly through the movie like his insomniac Fight Club character, a man impatiently trying to rush through his own nightmare in order to return to blissful sleep.

Ratner has made a profiler/serial killer movie for our time and our country, a film in which evildoers are not to be understood but merely brought down. The result may not be particularly thoughtful, but it is primitively satisfying.