Hannibal Rising
Smokin' Aces
Hannibal Rising
The latest effort to milk the success of "The Silence of the Lambs," "Hannibal Rising" reveals Hannibal Lecter's earlier years. The film begins in 1944, near the Eastern Front, where most of Hannibal's family is killed and his only surviving sister is cannibalized by a gang of profiteering bandits. Young Hannibal (played by a lifeless Garpard Ulliel) manages to escape but is haunted by nightmares of his poor sister's demise. In a Soviet orphanage, he learns the art of sticking forks into bullies' hands. Later, in a medical school in France, he learns to carve things up, develops a gourmet's taste for cheek flesh, and is taught how to use a sword by his late uncle's wife Lady Murasaki (Gong Li). After the war, he puts all these skills to good use in order to exact vengeance on the guys who gobbled up sis. "What he is now, there is no word for it, except monster," remarks a French police inspector. What "Hannibal Rising" is, there is no word for it, except asinine. It's a movie idea scraping to find a story. Events and ideas are indiscriminately piled on top of each other like a junkyard heap in a movie that masquerades as a sweeping historical epic with its references to Vichy France and Nuremberg. It's so bloated and pretentious, it makes me miss slasher films.
( Sherwin Das )
Once upon a time Han-nibal Lecter was a sweet little boy who lived in a big castle in Lith-uania and who loved his mummy, daddy and sister very much. But then came the war and his mummy and daddy were shot down before some evil Lithuanian mercenaries ate his beloved sister to save themselves from starvation. And so Hannibal grew up to be a monstrous serial killer with a taste for human flesh. As the ridiculous title suggests, "Hannibal Rising" attempts to give Lecter a mythical, dare we say biblical dimension, but it's little better than a slasher film. Still, it's entertaining viewing if only to spot the many errors in the story. When Hannibal travels from Paris to Soviet Lithuania to start exacting his revenge on those who ate his sister, his train arrives at the border town of Medininkai, which happens to be on the eastern border of the country. You'd think Thomas Harris might at least have bothered looking at a map to get this detail right. But this is a half-baked story in every way, from the incongruous foreign names to the incongruous foreign accents to the facile invocation of wartime horrors.Â
( Tim Ochser )
Smokin' Aces
In "Smokin' Aces," Vegas performer Buddy "Aces" Israel (Jeremy Piven) has a large bounty put on his head when he agrees to testify against the mob. When word of the bounty hits the street, an assortment of roughnecks, rednecks, bandits, hitmen and hitwomen converges on the Las Vegas hotel where Israel is holed up, all in a race to take him out. "Smokin Aces" is a knock-off of the slick, adrenaline-pumping gangster films in the vein of Guy Ritchie's "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels." But while the latter film was smart and entertaining, "Smokin Aces" is neither. The introduction of innumerable would-be assassins got my head spinning right away. I was put into a queasy delirium further along by a climactic shootout sequence in which everyone fires upon everyone else at the same time, again and again, endlessly, ad infinitum. I suspect that "Smokin Aces" is a wet dream for armchair mercenaries and readers of Soldier of Fortune magazine, who can see all their favorite automatic weapons in vivid action and bask in a thunderous cacophony of exploding ammunition. I can scarcely remember what little happened in the film, but the rat-tat-tat of the countless guns a-firing is still echoing in my head.Â
( Sherwin Das )
"Smokin' Aces" begins badly and ends disastrously. In short, it's complete crap. The story revolves around several hitmen trying to get to Buddy 'Aces' Israel (Jeremy Piven), a showman turned mafia figure who is on the verge of sealing a tell-all deal with the FBI. Aces is holed up in a Lake Tahoe penthouse and the FBI have to get to him before the competing hitmen, which include a lesbian couple and a group of neo-Nazis. There is something offensively bad about "Smokin' Aces." Its climatic scenes are so gratuitously violent and bloody that even the most jaded viewer might raise an eyebrow. But then the film ludicrously changes tone toward the end, adopting a jarringly insincere sentimentality. And as for the surprise 'twist,' it's so obvious you see it coming from miles away. Director Joe Carnahan is clearly an admirer of the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, but this film has neither the freshness nor the charm that made their takes on the gangster film so enjoyable. He tries using every trick in the book and still falls totally flat. Perhaps the "Scary/Date/ Epic Movie" franchise could borrow it when it gets around to doing the gangster film.
( Tim Ochser )
