If you’ve ever wanted to know exactly what turned Hannibal Lector from an urbane British doctor into a bloodthirsty cannibal, don’t expect to get satisfaction from Hannibal Rising, a prequel which doesn’t make much sense if you’re at all familiar with the films from this grisly franchise.

Those movies: Manhunter, Red Dragon, Hannibal and, most notably, Silence of the Lambs, are all based on best sellers by novelist Thomas Harris.

In this case, the latest Harris novel was only released in December, reinforcing the rumor that the book was ostensibly a rush job strewn quickly together after the screenplay had already been written. As a result, Hannibal Rising suffers from a failure to mesh with the prior cinematic hits.

       For instance, everybody knows that Hannibal was British, having been played by Brian Cox and Sir Anthony Hopkins, who both had an obvious British accent.

However, they’ve now made up some royal roots for the character, stipulating that he was born a Count, not unlike another maniacal Eastern European murderer, Dracula, with whom he now shares a disturbing number of similarities.

The story opens in Lithuania during World War II, just as the Lector family castle is about to be overrun by the Nazis. There, it is established that the seeds of Hannibal’s (Gaspard Ulliel) later depravity were sown when a German fighter plane mowed down the young boy’s parents (Richard Leaf and Ingeborga Dapkunaite) right in front of his eyes. Then, the kid really loses it after a gang of local collaborators who commandeered the rundown estate he and his family flocked to when the war started not only slaughter his little sister, Mischa (Helen Lia Tachovska) for food, but feed him parts of her body too.

From the scene of this understandably traumatic tragedy, the film fast-forwards to post-war France where we find teenage Hannibal in his family castle, which has been turned into a boys’ home. After attacking a staff member, Hannibal escapes from his childhood home. In a daring move, he crosses the Berlin wall and crosses into France. From here Hannibal enrolls in medical school and moves into the chateau of his recently-widowed aunt, Lady Murasaki Shikibu (Gong Li), whose relatives perished in the atomic explosion at Hiroshima. With so much loss in common, it is no surprise that sparks start to fly between the pair of forlorn orphans, the incestuous of the liaison notwithstanding.

Yet, despite falling in love, and the prospects of a promising career, Hannibal remains driven to exact revenge on each and every one of the war criminals responsible for plundering his community and death his sibling.

As a consequence, Hannibal Rising really amounts to more of a vigilante adventure on the order of Death Wish, rather than a true slasher flick. For this wholesale overhaul manipulates the audience to root for, rather than hate, its sadistic protagonist as he hunts down his prey and savors dining on their flesh, such as a tasty brioche comprised of wild mushrooms and fresh human cheeks.

The film’s near fatal flaw rests with this recasting of Hannibal as an admirable Nazi hunter capable of love and compassion, a person who bears little relation to the psychopathic misanthrope doctor whose soul was as black as midnight and was void of any human compassion that so easily sent shivers running up and down an audience’s spine.

By Todd Hutchinson