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Written by Colin Covert, McClatchy Newspapers
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Thursday, 08 February 2007 |
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 HANNIBAL RISING
1 star
Starring: Gaspard Ulliel, Gong Li
Directed by: Peter Webber
Rating: R for strong grisly violent content and some language/sexual references.
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The greatest flaw in "Psycho" is the last-reel sequence that brings a psychoanalyst into the story to clarify why Norman Bates dressed up in his mother's clothes and knifed Marion Crane in the motel shower: It was all due to a frustrated Oedipal fixation.
That unwieldy chunk of exposition broke the spell that made the film so troubling and subversive. It's as if a chemist was summoned to describe how Dr. Jekyll's formula transformed him into Mr. Hyde.
Imagine "Psycho's" explanation puffed out to feature length and you understand the effect of "Hannibal Rising," which charts the formative years of pop culture's favorite cannibal. Cruel, predatory, seductively charming and tinged with an immense sadness, Lecter has become an indelible bogeyman. 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.
The film opens powerfully in the late days of World War II. Hannibal, age 7, and his beloved younger sister, Mischa, flee their imposing ancestral castle as the German-Soviet battle for the Eastern Front reaches their doorstep.
The environment and the battlefield details are vividly realized; you can almost smell the diesel exhaust when Russian tanks rumble across the screen. A pitched battle leaves the children orphaned, then imprisoned by marauding looters, and then ...
What occurs (teasingly hinted at in numerous flashbacks) renders the boy mute until his teenage years and unbalanced for life. Poor thing - he's just misunderstood! French actor Gaspard Ulliel plays Hannibal as a creepy and prematurely suave young man, one eyebrow permanently cocked in an ironic leer.
You could envision him growing up to become Danny Huston, but never Anthony Hopkins.
A decade after the war, Hannibal treks to France and moves in with his late uncle's Japanese wife, Lady Murasaki (Gong Li.) They develop an intense, semiamorous relationship when she's not teaching him flower arranging and kendo combat techniques. As sure as she has a collection of samurai swords, the gendarmes are soon puzzling over the decapitation of a tradesman who was rude to her ladyship.
The film follows Hannibal into medical school and mass murder as he stalks five men who brutalized his sister. His early efforts at filleting and fricasseeing his enemies are duly recorded, but they never freeze the hair on your neck. Director Peter Webber can compose an eye-pleasing frame (he made his previous film, the Vermeer biography "Girl with a Pearl Earring," glow like a Dutch masterpiece) and he films solid wartime battle scenes, but he's unable to orchestrate mounting suspense. There's no glory in Hannibal's ability to outwit the war criminals he's hunting. They're a thick-skulled bunch who obligingly stumble into his traps.
When the tables are turned, Hannibal is saved by improvised explosives that detonate at the exact millisecond they're the most helpful; bullets that strike only where he's armor-plated. His survival depends less on the hallmarks of his character, ferocity and genius, than on dumb luck. Even though our psychopath is still in his training-wheels phase, he should have more command of the situation than this.
"Hannibal Rising" concludes with a jaunty joke like the one that ended Jonathan Demme's classic "The Silence of the Lambs" and launched the Lecter cycle. Let's hope the story ends there. "Hannibal: The Surgical Internship Years" is not a movie many will be clamoring to see. | Only registered users can write comments.
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