Set in eastern Europe toward the end of WWII, Hannibal Rising begins with the Lector family fleeing their castle in Lithuania. They hide in a small, remote cabin, but soon they are overrun by combatants. The young Hannibal (Aaron Thomas), along with his sister “Mischa” (Helena-Lia Tachovska), manage to survive the melee, but shortly thereafter, they are discovered by a band of renegade soldiers. With no other place to go, the soldiers stay at the cabin with the two children. But the onset of brutal winter weather causes their food source to run dry. So, the soldiers decide to make a meal out of Mischa.

Fast-forward several years later, we see Hannibal Lector (Gaspard Ulliel) as a young adult. He survived the horrific ordeal with the soldiers, but is constantly tormented by the memory of his sister getting killed. He now attends a boarding school, that was once his family’s estate, but eventually leaves to stay with his newly widowed aunt (Gong Li). With the support of his new benefactor, Lector proceeds to enact revenge on the soldiers responsible for his sister’s death.

Had I not known better, I would have guessed someone other than Thomas Harris wrote the story for Hannibal Rising. Yet, the creator of the “Hannibal Lector” character wrote both the story and screenplay.

For whatever reason, Harris deviates from the cold, ruthless, and indiscriminate killer that we’ve come to know, love, and hate in the Hannibal Lector character, and decides to turn him into a sympathetic and justified vigilante. Part of the fascination with the Hannibal Lector mythos stems from the fact that he is a highly educated and intelligent individual, yet he is also an uncompassionate psychopath. In Hannibal Rising, Harris abandons this dichotomy and tries to justify Lector’s behavior with a rudimentary historical genesis.

Harris displays a vulgar lack of effort in his simplistic attempt to analyze the mind of this cannibalistic killer. One of the lines that stuck with me, paraphrased from both Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, was “Monsters are not born, but made that way through years of systematic abuse.” Yet, this half-baked tale of revenge in Hannibal Rising seems to contradict this theory, and Harris attempts to unravel the complex psychological profile of Dr. Lector with a simple and solitary event. Indeed, even Agent Starling’s “blunt tool” of a psychological evaluation in The Silence of the Lambs would have been able to discover the genesis of Dr. Lector’s sinister psyche if it was truly based on something as simple and basic as the death of his sister.

While any actor cast for the young Hannibal Lector would inevitably face scrutiny following in the footsteps of Oscar-winner, Sir Anthony Hopkins, I believe they could have found a much better replacement other than Gaspard Ulliel. This french actor has very few lines in the first couple scenes, but when the dialogue becomes more substantial, Ulliel makes a vain attempt at an “Anthony Hopkins” impersonation. Rather that taking the Hannibal Lector persona and adding his own flavor, it seemed like Ulliel went out of his way to try and mimic Hopkins. The end result was forced over-acting, and an unconvincing performance.

People who really enjoy Thomas Harris’s novels, and the “Dr. Lector” movies, might want to see this movie, just for the sake of seeing it. But Hannibal Rising has a much weaker plot than the other stories in the series, with a lot less thrills and suspense.