'Hannibal Rising': Broken 'Silence'

How Could It Pump That Much Blood And Yet Lack Heart?

"Hannibal Rising" is a gourmet dish of revenge, served cold.

The movie boasts great spectacle: Stuka vs. tank, Gong Li vs. her too-tight satin robe, Hannibal Lecter vs. the five freebooters who chop-sueyed his li'l sister one gray, wintry afternoon on the Eastern Front, some cool guns (loved the Mauser Broomhandle and the StG-44) and two or three very nice, rosy-orange propane explosions. As a treat for us uber-depravos, it even featured several examples of my longtime pulp favorite, the beheading.

But it's cold as a nickel left in the snow since December.

It's the only one of the Thomas Harris adaptations ("Black Sunday," "Manhunter," "The Silence of the Lambs," "Hannibal," "Red Dragon") to boast the credit "Screenplay by Thomas Harris," and, given the book's publication hardly a month ago, it was apparently envisioned both as a novel and a movie, with Harris writing prose and script simultaneously. Great work if you can get it and if you can do it.

But maybe he can't. The book, although nowhere near the top of his canon, is far superior -- richer, darker, sadder, a flawed work of some resonance -- than the movie, which is sheer dazzle and little else, guilty fun but negligible. It's a prequel of sorts, how the killer Hannibal Lecter came to be. Harris cobbles together a theory that blends equal parts nature and nurture. In the book, he was able to make a point that Hannibal was the scion of an illustrious, warrior-rich Lithuanian aristocratic family. He was extremely intelligent, exquisitely educated by a wise and refined tutor in a rarefied world of love, succor, stability and stimulation. Then, one mercy-free day in 1944, it was all taken away by the collision of Soviet ground forces (a T-34 tank) with German air forces (a Ju 87 dive bomber; a Stuka). When these two monsters killed each other in the courtyard of a hunting lodge, alas Hannibal's mother, father, tutor and assorted servants were sheared down by the shrapnel, orphaning the child and his younger sister. Soon some scummy lads arrive, battlefield parasites who loot, torture and -- after the arrival of heavy snow -- eat. Hannibal (Aaron Thomas plays the child) survives; his sister Mischa (Helena Lia Tachovska) does not.

He thus decides upon a life's work: They ate her, so I shall eat them!

The movie streamlines all this, as it does with much of the rest of the book: Gone is the tutor, and the staff and mère et père are reduced to cameo. It's a shame, because it results in the movie's fundamental flaw -- the one-dimensionality of Hannibal.

Novels are almost always better than movies, and in the books, Harris was able to suggest both Hannibal's predatory instincts, his will to cold violence, the complex mesh of motive and fury that made him so dangerous; but also the highly developed intelligence and artistic sensibility that made him so interesting.

That duality is gone in the movie. Hannibal is pure killing machine and one never senses a struggle in him between killer and polymath, between the dark and the light. It doesn't help that the young French actor Gaspard Ulliel ("A Very Long Engagement") -- as he has no deftness or technique by which to suggest complexity -- has clearly been cast for his face. It's a face made for eating, long of jaw, sharp of feature (cheekbones like daggers), glittery and cunning of eye, smileless except for a post-kill smirk. It works as mask, but it never expresses.

One might say we've been spoiled by Anthony Hopkins, who could embody two opposing psychological tendencies. You could see his utter craziness yet understand its coexistence with the aesthete who was addicted to artistic beauty in all its forms. Director Peter Webber has no interest in this. Webber's too busy setting up the kills.

Thus, a lot of what happens fails to make any emotional sense. For example, escaping from the dreariness of Stalinist Lithuania and its state orphanages, Hannibal goes to live with his uncle's widow in France. In the book, the uncle was alive, so the eventual emotional connection between the young, feral Hannibal, fresh from the nihilism of the war, and the uncle's widow, a willowy Japanese beauty named Lady Murasaki, had a facilitator; you understood how the uncle's love was absorbed and continued by the widow.

Here, the uncle is already dead, so why does the sophisticated woman fall into a weirdly passionate bond with the creepy boy? Harris is actually playing a largely pointless game of texts. The name Lady Murasaki refers to the 11th-century Japanese aristocrat who wrote the world's first great novel, "The Tale of Genji." The movie at least partially repeats that plot -- the story of an ambitious young man raised by his stepmother, who ultimately became her lover.

But this impulse isn't developed and soon we get into serious business, the snarly, smirky young Hannibal's hunt for the five freebooters across France and Eastern Europe, and his elimination of them by careful yet showy methods. I think I liked the guy who got drowned in the med school corpse tank the best, although the guy who got a tanto shoved into his jaw until it popped out the top of his head was kind of cool, too. When Hannibal finally gets around to head henchman Grutas (Rhys Ifans), it's kind of anticlimactic, even if the scenario bears a startling similarity to an Alpo commercial.

The movie is handsome, swift and cold. It squanders Gong and possibly it squanders Harris. But if you've ever hungered to know what a really sharp samurai katana will do to a really fat guy, it's a must-see.

Hannibal Rising (118 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for nasty gore, grisly violent content, some profanity and sexual references.