Given the recent spate of horror-movie prequels, we can at least be grateful that the makers of Hannibal Rising, in perhaps their sole moment of clarity, decided that Hannibal: The Beginning might be a tad obvious. As it turns out, the title, with its priapic agency and whiff of retribution, is the high point of a back story that ought to have remained firmly in our imaginations. Like Leatherface and Freddy Krueger, Hannibal Lecter is a monster who thrives in the dark; probe his past, and there's a danger of finding only banality.
But this is America, where all pathologies must be excavated and neutralized, so we're off to 1944 Lithuania, where the Lecter family is facing down Nazis, Russians, Vichy French and wild boars. The arrival — and subsequent dinner plans — of a gang of starving thugs swiftly disposes of young Hannibal's little sister and awakens his cannibalistic cravings. Eight years in a Soviet orphanage do little to rehabilitate. "You do not honor the human pecking order," the warden tells Hannibal (Gaspard Ulliel). ''You're always hurting the bullies." Clearly he's more disturbed than we think.
Scarcely pausing to wonder which wine goes best with East European thug, Hannibal sets out to avenge his sister and devise recipes. His mission entails a detour in a Parisian medical school to hone his slicing technique, as well as a sojourn with a Japanese aunt (Gong Li, 鞏俐) who's unperturbed when he beheads a butcher who has insulted her honor.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF CMC
''You smell of smoke and blood,'' she tells her nephew fondly, struggling with dialogue that would make Jessica Simpson demand a rewrite. Silly, slack and unforgivably tedious, Thomas Harris' screenplay is padded with interminable flashbacks and a bombastic score that telegraphs every emotion Hannibal represses. And there are a lot of them.
Evidencing too much respect and too little energy, Peter Webber directs this operatic mess with none of the subtlety and wit he brought to Girl With a Pearl Earring, a less brutal but no less perverse project. Burrowing into the id of pop culture's most repulsive gourmet demands a sanguinary glee that Webber may not possess; for all the movie's spurting gore, there's no accompanying rush of blood to the head.
Almost everyone involved seems deadened by the literalness of the material, especially Ulliel, whose lanky, effete avenger may snack on the cheeks of his victims but never hardens into a genuine horror. He's like Anthony Hopkins's brain-damaged sibling.
Conceived in the clamor of the marketplace, Hannibal Rising, like its predecessor Hannibal, makes a star out of a character who should exist only in the margins, a peripheral terror made larger by mystery. The success of The Silence of the Lambs depends on a dense mixture of psychological intrigue and stylized flashes of brutality, glimpsed only from the corner of the eye like fleeting hints of Lecter's psychoses. Hannibal Rising drags these into the light and applies a magnifying glass, reducing one of our most mythic villains to a callow, dysfunctional chef.
"Oil of cloves," the French detective announces, sniffing one of Hannibal's victims. Even in the age of C.S.I. there are some clues only a Frenchman can be trusted to decipher.
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