Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on February 9, 2007, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
The opening scenes of Hannibal Rising, set during WWII, are vivid and immediate and get the movie off to a rousing start. The aristocratic Lecter family are minding their own business in their ancestral Lithuanian castle when the Nazi war machine begins to close in, and they’re forced to flee to a house hidden away in the woods. But the combat catches up to them, and all the adults are killed, leaving little boy Hannibal (Aaron Thomas) and his baby sister Mischa (Helena-Lia Tachovska, a remarkably expressive and reactive little actress) at the mercy of local thugs anxious to make an impression on their Nazi employers. And as time goes on, with winter raging outside and not enough food to go around, the goons begin eyeing little Mischa…
As staged by director Peter Webber and lensed by Ben Davis, this lengthy prologue is a solid start for a movie…but not, as it turns out, for a movie about Hannibal Lecter as we’ve come to know and love/hate him, as performed by Anthony Hopkins over the course of three movies and before that by Brian Cox in Manhunter. There’s certainly room for a reinvention of a popular character by dramatizing his early days with a new actor (Casino Royale proved that in spades), but Hannibal Rising ends up as a halfhearted exercise that doesn’t jibe with Hannibal’s previous screen vehicles.
The best that can be said about the movie is that on a physical level, it doesn’t feel like a knockoff. The lush cinematography and production design, combined with the varied European locations, give Hannibal Rising the look of a classical painting streaked with gore, similar to the recent historical serial-killer drama Perfume. The comparison is kinda ironic, actually; in that film, British newcomer Ben Whishaw was magnetic as Gallic villain Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, but young French actor Gaspard Ulliel seems out of his depth taking over for Welshman Hopkins (and Scotsman Cox) as Hannibal here. (Were he not too old for the part as written, Rhys Ifans, who also hails from Wales and co-stars as one of Hannibal Rising’s villains, might have been a better choice.)
Ulliel doesn’t get much help from Thomas Harris’ script, which, despite being this film series’ first screenplay written by Hannibal’s creator, feels both overdone and undercooked (pardon the culinary puns). Like so many screen bogeymen before him, Lecter loses a good deal of his chilling appeal once a concrete backstory and psychological motivation have been given to him. More to the point here, the latter almost contradicts what we’ve been led to believe about Hannibal previously. The bad doctor seen in Manhunter, Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal and Red Dragon came off as an intellectual monster, a man who believes himself superior to others to the point where he sees them as toys to be played with—or, on a baser level, as meat to be consumed.
Certainly he didn’t feel like a person whose activities were inspired by something so base as revenge—but that’s just how Hannibal Rising’s scenario plays out. After little Mischa is consumed (offscreen) by Ifans’ Grutas and his band, we pick up with Hannibal as a teenager in an orphanage (set up in his family’s old residence, one of the script’s few stabs at irony). He’s been rendered mute by his traumatic past, but his mind is deviously active, and he contrives payback against a bully before escaping and making his way to the French estate of his uncle—whom he learns has died before being taken in by his aunt. Rather incongruously given the post-WWII setting, she’s a Japanese woman, Lady Murasaki (Gong Li), whose predilection for displaying samurai artifacts comes in handy when Hannibal, who begins speaking again, starts plotting vengeance against his family’s destroyers.
The rest of the film plays out with more inevitability than suspense, especially since there’s little standing in Hannibal’s way; Lady Murasaki seems to tacitly approve of his quest (the two even become romantically involved along the way), and a desultory investigation is undertaken by Inspector Popil (Dominic West), a war crimes investigator with no reason to be especially distressed about the deaths of Nazi collaborators. As Hannibal cuts a bloody trail back in Lithuania and then around his new home in Paris, Ulliel does his best to recapture Hopkins’ sardonically scary persona, but his efforts to submerge his native accent in another are sometimes palpable, and he lacks the gravitas to make this Hannibal, as written, more than just another cinematic avenger dispensing sarcastic bon mots as he dispatches a series of victims who deserve what’s coming to them. There’s not a great deal of terror to be had at the murders of people who’ve earned their fates, or in watching Hannibal become a monster (since we know that’s coming), and without a foil like Clarice Starling or Will Graham to oppose him, there isn’t a great deal of drama either. For her part, the beautiful Li comes off better acting in English here than she did in Miami Vice, but is given too little to work with.
It says something about how far the series has fallen that Harris, in both book and screenplay, ends Hannibal Rising with that basic suspense scenario of the villains kidnapping the (anti-) hero’s love interest so that he has to rescue her in addition to taking out the bad guys. Hannibal deserves better, and so do audiences. By this point, the continuation of the series is clearly being motivated less by creative inspiration than by franchising concerns, no better expressed than in the moment where Hannibal briefly puts on a Japanese half-mask—for no other reason than to foreshadow the mouth restraint forced onto him in Silence. Were he a real-life character, the good doctor and lover of culture might well go after Rising’s producers for exploiting him like this.
