Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
2/26/07
Franchises run their course
for all kinds of reasons. A continuing story concludes (The Lord
of the Rings trilogy). A huge cast becomes too expensive to maintain
(the X-Men series). There's a single movie so awful no one
can imagine sequeling it (Batman and Robin). In the Batman
case, Warner Bros. enjoyed a box office windfall by going back in time
with a new actor for the origin story prequel Batman Begins.
Frustrated with the creative direction of their James Bond series, Sony
hit paydirt with the origin story Casino Royale.
Now, with Lord of the Rings, X-Men, and even Star Trek
prequels in the works, MGM hits a speed bump with Hannibal Rising.
Trying to overcome Anthony Hopkins' advancing age and lack of interest
in reprising his iconic role by imagining Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter's
post-WWII origins, Rising held my interest for a while but can't recapture
the magic of Silence of the Lambs or Red Dragon.
In the final days of World
War II, young Hannibal (Aaron Thomas) and Mischa Lecter (Helena Lia Tachovska)
witness the deaths of their parents at the hands of Nazi goons. A
storm sets in and the two children are left trapped in their home with
a group of wannabe SS officers who find food hard to come by. Their
hungry eyes soon turn toward Mischa, and the plot mercifully flashes forward
to an teenage Hannibal running away from a Soviet orphanage. He finds
his way to Paris, where he's taken in by his late Uncle's widow Lady Murasaki
(Gong Li) and gets himself accepted to medical school. But Hannibal
can't move on, both because he's tormented by nightmare visions of his
sister's death and because, well, he's just not a normal guy. When
a nasty butcher (Charles Maquignon) insults Lady Murasaki in a market,
Hannibal reacts the only way he knows how: by brutally murdering
him. Enter Inspector Popil (Dominic West), who specializes in war
crimes. He also lost family during the war, and sympathizes with
Hannibal's plight. But there's much more violence to come now that
the Doctor-in-training has developed a taste for murder and turns his attention
to hunting down the men responsible for his sister's death.
I suspect that if I ever
see Hannibal Rising again, I'll be amazed by how bad it is.
The pace is slow, the acting mediocre at best, and the story doesn't really
add up to much. However, on a single viewing, I must admit a certain
fascination with the way Thomas Harris (the writer of all four Lecter novels
doing the screenplay honors for the first time) has staged the A&E
Network's dream battle: Serial Killer v. Nazi. From the odiously
self-absorbed Grutas (Rhys Ifnas) to the spotlessly remade family man Kolnas
(Kevin McKidd), these fiends are getting a taste of their own soulless
medicine from the kind of madman who would replace them as the Boogymen
of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Take the Anthony Hopkins
connection away (I'll get to that in a moment), and it's really interesting
to watch the way this guy who happens to be named Hannibal Lecter discovers
his sociopathic calling at the feet of the masters: a torch of evil
is being passed. Gaspard Ulliel delivers a memorably diseased performance,
and there's something about the way he smiles that makes me think he could
have played The Grinch without the makeup. But he's not Anthony Hopkins.
And his character doesn't
just “happen” to be named Hannibal Lecter either, and that's where the
movie starts to get away from itself. I doubt many people would pay
to see a star-free thriller about a bunch of Nazis being hunted down by
a serial killer in 1950's Paris: the promise of a Hannibal Lecter
origin story is the draw. After the clever ways Batman Begins
and Casino Royale were able to give backstory
and motivation to their iconic lead characters, it's really disappointing
to see that there's no “revelation” in Hannibal Rising that really
connects with the oddly sympathetic fiend we came to love in the earlier
(or is it later?) movies. Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal was a man of
culture and refinement. Ulliel's is a maniacal thug. His only
cultural education is in all things Japanese, which seems more at home
for Batman: I can't recall a single bit of Japanese culture in Hopkins'
world in any of the three movies in which he appeared. And it's one
thing to suggest that the Nazis' example channeled young Lecter's soulless
urges toward the culinary, it's another altogether to say that without
their example he would have grown up all good and true. The movie
actually seems to be reaching for the later explanation, but luckily leaves
enough wiggle room for me to take it the former way if I chose (and I did).
Director Peter Webber (The
Girl With the Pearl Earing) sets a dark and serious tone that works
for the story at times, but can't find the goulish humor that skillfully
broke the tension of the earlier films. He also can't pull back from
lines like “He ate my sister!” that threaten to inject humor whether the
movie wants it or not. As far as elaborate murders, this Hannibal
is an amateur compared to his later self and the crimes don't exactly work
either as horror or justice because neither the perpetrator nor the victims
are exactly sympathetic. The cast is perhaps too respectful and sedate:
either way, the characters don't come alive the way one might hope.
As I mentioned, Ulliel has the creepiness down but not the humanity (ironic,
in a movie obsessed with humanizing the character). I'm not a big
Gong Li fan, I tend to find her cold and distant and nothing here changes
that. Ifnas is adequate as the wonderfully named Grutas, but can't
find that extra level that would make him a classically detestable villain
the way, say, Peter Stormare might have. He is the best of the Nazi
bunch, the others are mostly anonymous, which also keeps the interest level
of their comeuppance from being what it might have been. Perhaps
the most spot-on work comes from Dominic West as the Inspector. Remembering
that what Hannibal has done best in the past is to work both with and against
law enforcement, the scenes between them keep suggesting better things
that might have been.
I could go on all day about
ways Hannibal Rising could have taken a better shot at its' goal
of a Hannibal Lecter backstory, but at the end of the day some characters
just aren't suited for that format. It would take so much of the
fascination out of the adult Hannibal to feel like his madness was someone
else's “fault”. A man so self-assured, so coolly intelligent yet
endlessly dangerous at least deserves the dignity of taking credit for
his own madness. |
