Hannibal Rising Poster
© MGM

Mania Grade: B
Maniac Grade: B
Reviewed Format: Theatrical Release
Rated: R
Stars: Gaspard Ulliel, Bai Ling, Dominic West, Rhys Ifans
Writer: Thomas Harris, based on his novel
Director: Peter Webber
Distributor: MGM/Weinstein Co.

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"Hannibal Rising"

Taken on its own terms as a standalone, Hannibal Rising is a decent, baroque revenge thriller with a sense of icy rage to it – the recipients of the main character’s wrath are so heinous that most viewers this side of Gandhi will feel some sympathy for Hannibal’s anger, though his methods are a more than a bit out there. It’s questionable that the film’s main flaw can actually be called a flaw, since it’s not a problem unless you want to put Hannibal Rising in continuity with the rest of the films involving Hannibal Lecter: Manhunter, with Brian Cox as the imprisoned, brilliant cannibal/serial killer/psychiatrist, then the more famous Oscar-winning Silence of the Lambs, its sequel Hannibal and the Manhunter remake Red Dragon, all with Anthony Hopkins in the role. 

Hannibal Rising gives us Hannibal Lecter as a child and as a young man, the latter played by Gaspard Ulliel. We get the background on why he’s so emotionally disconnected – though he’s certain in touch with his inner fury here – and why he feels eating his enemies is appropriate. During WWII, eight-year-old Hannibal (Aaran Thomas) and his even younger sister Mischa (Helena-Lia Tachovska) are first orphaned by a bombing raid, then taken prisoner by a rogue company of Lithuanian SS men, who do something so awful that for awhile, Hannibal blanks it from memory. Eight years later, he begins to recall what happened, escapes the bleak orphanage where he’s being kept (after exacting fatal retaliation on the in-house bully) and heads on foot to France, where his uncle’s Japanese widow, Lady Murasaki (Bai Ling), welcomes him warmly. Hannibal goes to medical school and begins tracking down the members of the SS squad, now living more or less normal lives. 

The atrocity perpetrated by the villains is so ghastly that even the police inspector (Dominic West) looking into Hannibal’s killings feels some empathy for our hero’s propensity for violence. There just isn’t any clue here how someone with this highly developed sense of righteousness – Hannibal does no harm to innocents, though he has a severe reaction to racist rudeness – goes from understandable if over-the-top vengeance to killing indiscriminately as he will later. 

However, as strictly a kind of gothic, brooding and very Grand Guignol treatment of the kind of plot traditionally acted out by the likes of Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Hong Kong action heroes, with torture and blood standing in for gunplay and flying fists/feet, Hannibal Rising works pretty well. Thomas Harris, in adapting his novel, keeps things moving well enough, and if he occasionally gives actors some really hard to speak lines (poor Ulliel has to exclaim several times the exact nature of his complaint against his adversaries), they are up to making it work. Ulliel in particular has a kind of sly enjoyment of what he’s doing that makes us complicit in what he’s doing – he shows us Hannibal being walled off from others without walling him off from the audience, an act of skill we can appreciate. Again, this works fine for Hannibal Rising, but it doesn’t give us the genuinely impenetrable figure the character becomes, nor even a clue as to how the transformation will take place. Peter Webber directs with a good sense of urgency, though a climactic fight feels more like something from a Bond film than a confrontation between monsters – until, that is, Hannibal’s more eccentric tendencies come into play and the film momentarily rises to the level of strangeness to which it seems to aspire throughout.