Cinematical

This time, there's nothing on the plate. Hannibal Rising, the fifth big-screen showdown between the effete anthropophagus and a declasse world that won't allow him to whip up brain soup like a bloody-lipped Rachel Ray, is a shaky bridge-too-far for the series. It dwells on two origin stories for the character, the first and most promising being a war story in which a mini-Stalingrad blows up outside young Lecter's Lithuanian castle, causing him to lose most of his family in a flash of blood and steel. All that remains is Mischa -- get used to that name, because the film uses it more than Tarantino uses the f-word -- and her big brother, who must grow wits in a war-scarred landscape. The android personality that Anthony Hopkins toyed with is not yet extant; the character is a shell-shocked child with another in tow. We're hardly settled into Saving Private Hannibal, however, when the voice of God -- er, Dino -- demands that we be whisked away to an Oriental atmosphere, to up the odds of boffo international box-office.

The odd contrarian cineaste will swear by Brian Cox's Lecter portrayal in Michael Mann's Law and Order-version of Red Dragon, but the community rightly pounced on Hopkins' take as definitive. His chrome sneer and impenetrable moral surety were a neat catch for a villain, offsetting the smugness and flaccid bon mots that weighed the character down -- and most importantly, there were small doses of everything. Lecter is not well-suited for the main stage. His sheer improbability as a human being demanded that his coming-out party, Hannibal, be a circus tent, with characters like Gary Oldman's old-moneyed, faceless ghoul trying valiantly to out-do a cannibal in a freak-sweepstakes. Cannibalizing Red Dragon for another go-round, this time with a relaxed, Sydney Pollack-attitude and lots of Ed Norton chin-scratching, also did nothing to up the stakes. With Hannibal Rising, the entire franchise screeches to an inglorious halt. It's a high-falutin' slasher film -- think Michael Myers holding a glass of sherry and reading leather-bound Wordsworth by the fire, and you get an idea.

The main action of this shabby project occurs after early-twenties Hannibal, played by the intriguing but mis-directed Gaspard Ulliel (A Very Long Engagement), finds himself alone in the world and decides to enter into the French domicile of his uncle's Japanese wife, played by confused-looking Chinese star Gong Li. As a way of saying thank you for the put-up, Hannibal sets up a grisly dispatch for a local oaf who has the temerity to insult Aunt Gong at the local market by asking if her vagina runs cross-ways. Meanwhile, Hannibal dabbles in Bushido like a West L.A. starlet and slowly reveals to his aunt plans to exact a Grand Guignol-revenge on the wartime grunts who finally put an end to his ordeal with his beloved Mischa. With Gong Li bearing down hard to deliver lines in English, she probably never had time to consider the lunacy of her character's situation, hosting a foppish Torquemada who improbably keeps up medical school classes while killing profusely and evading a detective on his trail, played by a weirdly-miscast Dominic West.

With a full roster of both plot-villains and random-villains, the picture quickly overwhelms itself with a killing slate. You can spot the characters who will become Lunchables from a mile away, since they have been crudely drawn to rub up against Hannibal's tastes established in earlier films -- anyone who is rude or vulgar to women or tries to thwart Hannibal's plans are not long for this world. In spite of this basic care paid to the plot structure, bones to long-time fans of the series are few and far between. I think I heard some Goldberg Variations thrown in during one scene, and there's a semi-recognizable Hopkins moment that occurs in a French police station, when during an interrogation, Hannibal tries to turn the tables on the detective by asking psych-evaluation-style questions of his own. For the most part, however, this longish film is a silly exercise in puffing air into the story of a kill-crazy maniac who can stomach flesh and whose soul is locked away in one of those file drawers in his vaunted 'memory palace.'

Producer Dino has said in interviews that the Hannibal character has the durability and romantic appeal of James Bond, and can therefore go on forever. "He only kills the people the audience wants killed," is a direct quote, I think. Anything is possible I suppose, but if James Bond's eternal qualities are a cold manner, an addiction to the trappings of the high-life, and an unswerving loyalty to the Queen, what are the unchanging characteristics of Hannibal? That he will kill anyone who pisses him off, and if he's in a bad mood, eat them? That he has a soft spot for damaged, introverted women who accept his secret identity as a thrill-killing liver-eater and still want to be pen-pals? That sound of crunching metal you hear when Hannibal Rising eats it at the box office will probably put these headache-inducing questions to rest once and for all, but if they don't, I suggest that the next film in the series end with Hannibal being killed in some gory manner, so that he can become immortal like all good movie slashers.