Starring: Gaspard Ulliel, Gong Li, Dominic West
Directed by Peter Webber
Rating: *
Hannibal Rising takes the sting out of the demonic Hannibal Lecter. And that has nothing to do with the fact that a callow Gaspard Ulliel can definitely not send a chill down our spine the way a fiendish Anthony Hopkins so easily could. The real problem is that the prequel to The Silence of the Lambs shows us graphically how and why he became the hideous cannibal. In the process, the entire Hannibal myth comes undone. The enigma, the horror, the disgust, the revulsion and the terror one has always associated with the infamous psychopath vanishes and get replaced by a little sympathy and empathy. Now, that’s bad news for any grisly bad boy.
Hannibal Rising takes us back to a young Lecter, sporting dirty nails and suffering from ghastly nightmares. He loses his parents in World War II and goes over to Paris to live with a sexy...
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