Hannibal Rising
Starring: Gaspard Ulliel, Gong Li, Rhys Ifans, Kevin McKidd
Director: Peter Webber
The film: Sometimes you just have to wonder. After draining all the life out of the Hannibal Lector franchise, some studio heads have dug up the corpse and tried to make it do one last sad and sorry dance. No prizes for guessing, then, that it falls flat on its face.
Hannibal Rising is bereft of anything but a stream of unintentional laughs. It's a well-packaged disaster that clearly had Hollywood's established - and more savvy - stars running for cover. Presumably, that's why the filmmakers were left to play with Frenchman Gaspard Ulliel and Gong Li (right with Rhys Ifans) - two actors eager to raise their profiles in the US, no matter what the cost.
The film takes us back to the second world war and tries to explain why Hannibal became the monster he was.
There's tragedy in his past, of course, and it takes only one look at the hungry Nazis who storm into his Lithuanian house to know what's going to happen. They lick their lips when they see Hannibal's sister. And it isn't because she's pretty.