1. Good freak-out fun for genre fans.
2. This horribly ill-conceived project is fake from start to finish, without a moment recognisable as real, and the story is often so badly told as to be laughable.
3. This is a footnote rather than a film.
4. In Hannibal Rising, the bad Dr. Lecter finally enters the pantheon of movie monsters for real: Like Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees, he, too, now has a sequel that's been made strictly for the sake of a buck.
5. I can't name an actor who could have made young Lecter as interesting as the older one, but Ulliel does not come close.
6. It's a handsome film, but the pace is continually gummy and the set-ups stiff and artificial. Most crucially, nothing in it vanquishes the sensation that we're being sold something superfluous.
7. Rising is a movie that solves a mystery no one should want solved, with more grisly crimes that spare us no detail, held together by an actor who is no Anthony Hopkins.
8. There is no action-movie cliché too rusty to be wheeled forth.
9. The great thing about monsters is that they glide noiselessly from nightmare straight into myth, fully formed and eternally mysterious. To know what made them is to explain them. And once you explain anything, you begin to lose your fear of it.
10. Hannibal Lecter does not need a creation story; he just needs to go away. The meal is over.
Based on these individual reviews, what is the critic consensus?
Hannibal Rising reduces the horror icon to a collection of dime-store psychological traits.