Picturenose

Monster mess

‘I’m evil,’ said Lecter. ‘You can’t reduce me to mere behavioural abnormality.’

The good Doctor Hannibal’s words to young Clarice Starling, from the pages of The Silence of the Lambs. But, unfortunately, that’s exactly what Hannibal Rising director Peter Webber (Girl With a Pearl Earring, 2003), and, unforgivably, novel/screenplay writer and Lecter creator Thomas Harris have done to what once was perhaps the zeitgeist’s most lip-smacking depiction of ambiguous, erudite wickedness.

In what seems to be an ever-increasing rush to celluloid (such as with Stephen King’s recent Cell, apparently down for film adaptation before King had even completed his book), Harris has seemingly sacrificed everything that made the amoral, brilliant Lecter so fascinating on the altar of misplaced sympathy for a traumatized child.

On with the set-up - an eight-year-old Hannibal (Aaron Thomas) and his beloved six-year-old sister Mischa (Helena Lia Tachovska), children of a Lithuanian count, are left to fend for themselves in 1944’s freezing war-torn winter, when their mother and father are killed by a crashing Russian plane. Lithuanian Nazi collaborators discover the pair; at first intending to use them as an alibi if captured by Russian soldiers, their thoughts (and stomachs) turn to more practical uses as their limited food supplies dwindle. Do they like children? Yes, and they could probably manage a whole one…

Cut to eight years later and Hannibal (Gaspard Ulliel), now a young teen and an unwilling, mute resident in a draconian orphanage, determines revenge on those who killed, cooked and ate his sister - he escapes to the house of his aunt, Lady Murasaki Shikibu (Gong Li), who takes him in and begins to educate him in Japanese culture, courtesy, discipline and honour. Hannibal, meanwhile, is learning lessons of his own…

It’s all so formulaic and predictable, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were watching The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones...first, we have the barely credible war-time sequences, with the ludicrously overplayed villains (Rhys Ifans as Grutas, Richard Brake as Enrikas Dortlich, Kevin McKidd as Petras Kolnas, Stephen Walters as Zigmas Milko, Ivan Marevich as Bronys Grentz and Goran Kostic as ‘Pot Watcher’) hastily introduced to provide caricatures to hiss at when we get tired of Hannibal’s rise to evil.

Which we do, all-too quickly - Ulliel’s one-note performance (sharp intake of breath and growl after an atrocity, twitching high cheekbone, metallically courteous fake accent) soon becomes tiresome and, even worse, it’s not as if he has been given anything particularly interesting to do apart from take revenge in increasingly grisly fashion. Michael Mann’s sublime Manhunter (1986) and Jonathan Demme’s very-nearly-as-good Silence of The Lambs (1991) gave us, in the performances of Brian Cox and Anthony Hopkins respectively, extra rare evocations of evil, Hannibal Lecters that really got under your skin. Filling the gaps in an also-ran (in fact, at times quite ludicrous) script with blood and guts was never going to work - couple this approach with stilted performances all round, little or no sense of what once made Lecter so scary and a pat, deeply unsatisfying resolution, and you’re left with one seriously half-baked dish.

And you can’t even drown your sorrows with a nice Chianti…

117 mins.