Movie Review - Hannibal Rising
In 1944, Hannibal Lecter and his family escape from their castle in Lithuania to a remote shack. However, his parents are killed in an attack by the Germans, and a group of mercenaries take Hannibal and his sister Mischa captive. Running out of food, the men kill Mischa and eat her before running off and leaving Hannibal for dead. Many years later, a teenage Hannibal moves to Paris to study medicine and lives with his Japanese aunt, Lady Shikibu (Gong). He also manages to discover the identities of those who killed Mischa, and tracks them down in order to enact revenge.If you take Hannibal Rising as separate from the Hannibal Lecter saga, it’s a pretty ordinary vendetta/slasher film. But if you find it impossible to do so the film is arguably even worse because it takes one of the most complex and captivating villains in cinematic (and literary) history and reduces him to a psychological archetype - the product of a horrific childhood. There’s an element of style about the production, and on its own terms it’s quite fun in places, but it’s no The Silence of the Lambs.
One reason why I personally found it so easy to disassociate the Hannibal in this film from his other appearances on celluloid is that the character looks and behaves so differently. For one thing, Ulliel looks nothing like Anthony Hopkins (or Brian Cox for that matter), but the character is missing something. Hannibal has always been as eloquent as he is monstrous, but here he’s almost monosyllabic. There’s no wit, no psychological mind games; he’s just out for bloody revenge. It doesn’t help matters that Ulliel’s performance often verges on camp, and his endless grinning is more annoying than it is disconcerting.
Elsewhere, Gong provides a welcome presence. In many ways her character is more creepy than Hannibal because it’s never clear how far she will go in protecting Hannibal from the police, whose suspicions he has aroused. Ifans delights in chewing the scenery has the vicious leader of the gang that murdered Mischa, but he never really poses much of a threat after that.
As one would expect from the director responsible for Girl with a Pearl Earring, Hannibal Rising is certainly a stylish film. The cinematography is nice to look at, there’s a certain amount of atmosphere in places, and the musical score isn’t bad either. But unlike in Ridley Scott’s vastly underrated Hannibal, these cosmetic elements seem to exist only to make up for the rather weak plot, rather than to accentuate it. The film is never actually scary or unnerving either, and in places it’s also rather sluggish.
Hannibal Rising is the one book of the Lecter series that I haven’t read yet, but since Thomas Harris is also responsible for the screenplay here I’m not sure I want to now. When Hannibal came out a few years ago, many people complained about how different it was from The Silence of the Lambs, or even Red Dragon before that. It certainly was different, but Lecter himself remained unchanged; he was the same person, just in different surroundings. Here though, the character has been weakened and has lost an element of his mystique. In fact, on the big screen, he’s little more than a Crispin Glover look-alike running around with a creepy smile on his face.
