Review of Hannibal Rising (2007) by Victor T — 15 Aug 2014

In the first decade of the 2000´s, prequels were the big thing to do with "Star Wars", "Casino Royal" and "Batman Begins" to name some examples; so it was matter of time for Hollywood to make Dr Lecter jump into this new tendency.

In 1944, Hannibal is an eight year old kid living in Lithuania´s "Lecter Castle" with his parents and sister Mischa. With the Soviets and Nazi attacking each other in this World War II era, the family travels to a hunting lodge but the conflict kills Hannibal´s parents and now he is reasonable for Mischa but six scavengers arrive to the lodge and take the kids hostage and kill Mischa. Now in 1952, Lecter is ready to avenge her sister.

Making a prequel is always a gamble, while they may be a box office success, they mostly are a huge letdown for the fans and have the potential of destroying the franchise, with little exceptions but "Hannibal Rising" is by no means one of those exceptions. The first thing that needs to be said is the acting of the new actor portraying the young version of Hannibal, French actor Gaspard Ulliel, is terrible; it's hard to believe is the same character of "Silence". But not only the new Lecter is just painful to watch but the entire cast gave horrible performances in boring characters that are even difficult to tell apart and absolutely no one is an exception. In this final installment Thomas Harris was not only the source material but also the screenwriter for this adaptation of his own work, it may sound like a good idea but Harris didn't know that an adaptation is to make the source material shorter in order to make an engaging and well done film, instead he gave audiences a slowly paced and boring story with pathetic dialog and lame scenes that's only tied to the other installments by name only; it really shows that Dino Di Laurentiis forced him to write this prequel . Director Peter Webber clearly wanted to do an artistic film but the only beautiful element in this film was the locations. But even with all of those gigantic problems, the worst of them is the story: Is so cliché, stupid, not memorable at all and they transformed a mesmerizing villain to a lame "Punisher" like antihero, while this was already done in "Hannibal" it's even more obvious and worse in this prequel. I tried to find some good in this film but really there is nothing worth watching here.

One of the worse prequels I ever see and it destroys the legendary character of Hannibal Lecter. There goes Hopkins, there goes your franchise.