HANNIBAL RISING
Release Date: May 29
Starring: Gaspard Ulliel, Gong Li, Rhys Ifans
Director: Peter Webber
Length: 117 minutes

Hannibal Lecter deserved better. In “Hannibal Rising,” one of the greatest screen villains gets a rather tepid origin story. It’s not a terrible movie, but this is Hannibal Lecter and expectations are high. How do you follow in Anthony Hopkins‘ masterful footsteps? It seems the producers didn’t even try to cast a worthy actor. French actor Gaspard Ulliel is forgettable as the young Hannibal Lecter, who evolves into a cannibal as he hunts down the men who killed his little sister during World War II. The movie is slow at times, but picks up once Hannibal starts eating through the cast. But “Hannibal Rising” adds very little to the “Silence of the Lambs” canon. If the main character wasn’t named Hannibal Lecter, it would have been an okay stand-alone thriller. But somebody had to cash in on Hannibal Lecter at least one more time.

DVD GOODIES
There are deleted scenes, commentary tracks by director Peter Webber and producer Martha De Laurentiis, and the featurettes “Hannibal Lecter: The Origin of Evil” and “Designing Horror and Elegance.”

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