3/10
No need for this movie
12 February 2007
Warning: Spoilers
Presented as a prequel of the well known "Manhunter" and "The silence of the lambs", this movie pays apparently no care for verisimilitude. Lecter - we learn - is a victim of brutal violence suffered when he was 8 years old. He survives bombing, war criminals, a Soviet orphanage, a travel from USSR to France in the 50es (with also a jump through the Berlin Wall), where he finds a beautiful Japanese (!) aunt (Gong Li). He already speaks a perfect French and is able to study medicine without apparently having had any education (in the orphanage scenes he cannot even speak due to the war trauma). Since he is Lithuanian, he probably could speak German (very common in those countries before WW2). Weird enough, the Japanese aunt is a survivor of the Hiroshima nuclear bombing and she is a sort of Super Geisha Samurai who can fight under the ancient rules of Kendo (something a woman of the 40es or 50es could not even dream to do in Japan). Lecter himself shows to be able to cut a man's head off in one single hit of sword, in a scene so silly that I could not keep from laughing. In the end, this movie is simply an example of commercial exploitation of a once good idea, just like "Red Dragon" (a completely useless remake of the masterpiece "Manhunter" by Michael Mann) and "Hannibal". Stick to the original ones and let this movies out of your "to see" list.
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