Hannibal Rising

Well if I’m going to follow through with something for once in my life it might as well be the Hannibal Lecter series.  Seeing as we’ve come this far, what’s one more movie? 

But first, did you realize that there are five films in this series including Manhunter?  That’s a number usually reserved for straight ahead horror flicks and Fast and Furiouses.  I don’t think anyone could’ve predicted we would see so many movies with this character but, of course, I’m glad there are.  People may groan and roll their eyes and say out loud during the new trailer “they’re doing another one?” but with each film the overall portrait of the series gets at least a little more interesting and sometimes (but not always) clearer.  For better or for worse I love to see what new (or the same) filmmakers and actors do with characters I like.  More often than not it’ll have you scratching your head wondering what they were thinking going in a certain direction but the thing is you never know if that direction is really going to work or not until you try it.    

With all of that said, this installment is probably the worst in this series.  That’s really hard to say too considering how boring and uneven Hannibal is.  But this one doesn’t fit very well (in a bad way).

Hannibal as a very young child witnesses his parents’ deaths during World War II.  They were minding their own business in Lithuania when all of a sudden the Germans and Russians go head to head right on their turf.  A German plane and a Russian tank (or vice versa, I’m not really sure which was which) start shooting at each other and Hannibal’s father gets caught in the crossfire.  When the plane dives towards the tank and the two crash into one another it causes an awesome multi-angle collision that produces a full fucking frame fireball.  And the mother dies as a result of that.  Hannibal and his little sister, Mischa, are the only survivors.  They hold up in a cabin for a while but some Lithuanian Nazis crash the party.  They’re all stuck there during the winter and they’ve run out of food which means they need to eat whatever’s on hand.  This includes a small bird and…well that’s it.  Actually, I thought it was great when the main bad guy here starts eating the bird raw because the subtitles say “slurping greedily” to describe the sound.  But that bird isn’t enough so they eat Mischa.  Soon after part of the house is bombed by the Russians and Hannibal makes his getaway in the confusion.  But the problem is that this group of six Lithuanian Nazis also escapes and eludes the Russians. 

Fast forward to eight years later where Hannibal is in his late teens now (and played by Gaspard Ulliel (Paris, Je T’Aime)) and flees Lithuania so he can meet up with his aunt in France.  (To my surprise) She’s a Japanese woman named Lady Murasaki played by Chinese actress Li Gong (Miami Vice (2006)).  She takes him under her wing and teaches him how to fight with a katana and to be strong, etc.  This part I found offensive because why do all Asian people have to know how to fight with a sword and/or know martial arts ‘n shit?  This part of the film felt the most out of place because just imagine Hannibal Lecter sparring with a sensei and getting beat up at first while the sensei says stuff like “always be prepared”.  It’s like the movie turned into The Karate Kid for a minute.

Then a suddenly sadistic Hannibal kills an asshole butcher, gets into med school and enacts his plan of revenge.  This is what they were leading up to the whole time folks, a revenge movie.  One by one he goes after the Lithuanian Nazis that ate his sister.  I had no idea this was the type of thing I was getting myself into when I popped this in.  I guess it would’ve helped to have read the tag line beforehand: “It started with revenge”.  But Hannibal was a killer before he went on his revenge mission.  The butcher I mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph I guess is supposed to be Hannibal’s first victim.  (Spoiler) He kills him with a katana.  Doesn’t seem very Lecter-like to me but what the hell, it was his first time so I’ll go with it.  By the way the reason he kills the guy is because he slapped his aunt on the ass and made fun of her vagina.  Having Hannibal react to poor manners like that against someone he likes/loves does seem in line with his character though.

The point I’m trying to make is that Hannibal seems evil from there on so it’s not the killing of the cannibalistic Nazis that turns him into a monster.  That seemed to happen over a period of time under Russian occupation of Lithuania and then this butcher incident finally brought it into fruition.  I don’t really understand where the cannibalism thing started with Lecter.  He saw some other dudes eat his sister when he was very young but how does that turn him into a cannibal?  The part about Hannibal acquiring a taste for human flesh isn’t explained.  In fact we never actually see him eat any part of a human in this film or in any of the other ones.  You would think that for having a name that rhymes and is synonymous with “cannibal” we would have seen him eat a human, some part of a human, any part of a human.  There’s a bunch of biting but he doesn’t swallow and this movie doesn’t break that tradition.  Even though there’s a part in this one where it’s implied that he ate a guy’s cheeks we don’t actually see him do it.  Maybe he was just making up the cannibalism stuff the whole time to get some street cred.

No one is particularly good in this including Ulliel and especially Gong.  Ulliel doesn’t seem totally natural in the role.  You can tell too much that he’s trying to imitate Anthony Hopkins.  And Gong does too much damn whisper talking and disappointing glancing.  She’s always either saddened or upset or both which makes for a very bland performance.  The lead Lithuanian Nazi bad guy was kinda fun to watch though because he was so comfortably evil.  Nothing was really below him like enslaving and beating women, killing innocent people or having someone shave his chest for him.

If I didn’t know that this was written by Thomas Harris (both book and screenplay) then I might not have believed it because this totally feels like it was another movie that was rewritten slightly to be the next Hannibal Lecter picture.  As I was watching it I thought this “beginning” movie felt a lot like a “beginning” movie for a superhero.  Just go with me on this for a minute.  You have a boy that’s gone through a tragedy, lost both parents, had to endure hardships growing up but learned to defend himself in clever ways, runs away to live with a distant relative who shows him how to be a warrior and a better man, etc., the young man leads a double life seeming to be a student by day and a revenge seeker at night eventually finding and punishing/killing those that have wronged him and his family.  With some variations here and there endless characters fit into this framework like Batman, Spiderman and Superman.  But in this case everything the guy goes through has the opposite effect and turns him into a serial killer.  It makes less sense that way though.  Wouldn’t you get turned off on cannibalism if the person you witnessed being eaten was your sister?  Wouldn’t that make you want to kill all cannibals and not become one?  Based on this film Hannibal wasn’t trained to be a killer exactly or taught that doing harm to others is a good thing.  He went eight years just being a kid and not being raised to be a maniacal sonuvabitch.  So he must have been born evil because I don’t understand where these sadistic feelings and thoughts are coming from.

Unfortunately I think Hannibal Rising muddies the waters of the character.  It certainly doesn’t answer a whole lot of questions nor does it show us what I think we all want to see: Hannibal Lecter murdering people and eating them while in Baltimore.  The glory years, not the adolescent years.  They took a whole film to explain what should have been a ten or fifteen minute intro to a middle years movie.  Instead they went too far back and made the story of his young adulthood too convoluted.  I’m not so interested in what caused the man to be a monster, I just want to see the monster.

I dunno man, this one’s just a hard pill to swallow.  It looks really good and is shot nice and I liked the World War II scenes but really there’s no reason to see this one.  It moves way too slowly, is too predictable and the deaths aren’t even that great.  Except for the butcher that gets killed with the samurai sword.  That was kinda cool.