Hannibal Rising: Critic Reviews

The new prequel Hannibal Rising provides a back story that ought to have remained firmly in our imaginations.

How much more interesting - and scary - to have given Hannibal a perfectly happy boyhood with not the smallest occasion for anger or violence.

Hannibal is a pure killing machine, and one never senses a struggle in him between the dark and the light.

Formerly masterful novelist Thomas Harris continues to pimp out the serial-killing cannibal he (and Anthony Hopkins) made famous.

I can't name an actor who could have made young Lecter as interesting as the older one, but Ulliel does not come close.

Harris, who adapted the screenplay, and director Peter Webber are faithful to his book. Strong production values, a lush score and scenic locations work seal the deal.

There's a certain stylishness from director Peter Webber (Girl With a Pearl Earring), but not enough good acting to make it stick.

Hannibal Rising is basically a Steven Seagal vigilante movie with a hero who eats the people he kills. At least it's ecofriendly.

Filmdom's greatest villain Hannibal Lecter has been both defanged and declawed.

Lecter is presented as a soul-dead vigilante who reserves his carnage for the truly deserving; that's a long way from the Lecter of Silence of the Lambs who kills and tortures innocent and guilty alike.

In the finest tradition of TV newsmagazines, Hannibal Lecter's penchant for serial murder turns out to be the result of a traumatic childhood.

What Hannibal Rising is, mostly, is a hoot. Gong Li cautions the nightmare-plagued Hannibal that 'Memory is a knife -- it can hurt you.' And let's not forget the classic, 'They ate my sister.'

By spelling out the traumas that turned a kind Lithuanian princeling into an epicurean serial killer, the movie reduces a figure of mythic evil to a jumbo case of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Director Peter Webber delivers all this with a painfully straight face, and the result is actually less interesting than your average horror movie of the week.

The movie succeeds on some level, but the series has definitely begun to eat its own with Hannibal Rising.

A well-produced but slow-moving thriller that never quite roars to life.

There is no action-movie cliche too rusty to be wheeled forth.

Rising is a movie that solves a mystery no one should want solved, with more grisly crimes that spare us no detail, held together by an actor who is no Anthony Hopkins.

Tilting his elegantly aquiline features downward while hoisting one eyebrow over a dark orb, curling his lips with Grinchian deliberation, he seems to be determined to kill people on the strength of his cologne alone.

As played by French actor Gaspard Ulliel, Hannibal is a playing-card joker: Ulliel performs every scene with the same dimpled smirk, which looks less like an expression than a plastic-surgery mistake.

What this nasty, brutish movie left me feeling was ashamed to be American. First of all: As a folk archetype, a supervillain for our times, this is the best we can come up with? A vaguely Eurotrash schoolboy who eats people's cheeks?

Critical miscalculations at every turn have taken this latest (and hopefully last) Hannibal movie beyond the realm of camp and into that special hell reserved for only the most rancid of sequels.

Prequel alternates between being awfully silly and awfully boring before settling on just plain awful.

Watching the earnest but under-qualified Ulliel perpetrate Hannibal's initial grisly slayings is like going back in time to hear the screeches of a violin virtuoso's incipient swipes on the strings the first time he picks up the instrument.