Hannibal Rising provides the backstory for one of modern film’s most notorious villains.

The Hannibal horror movie franchise (Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon) gets an extraneous third installment from best-selling novelist and scriptwriter Thomas Harris. With over 150 films to his credit, iconic film producer Dino De Laurentiis valiantly attempts to compensate for the material’s shortcomings by stacking the cinematic deck with an ardently talented cast and crew that execute the story with bold performances against a European backdrop.

French actor Gaspard Ulliel (Strayed) plays the incipient cannibal who, after his affluent parents are murdered by Nazis near his family’s Lithuanian castle, witnesses the cannibalization of his younger sister by a desperate pack of rogue soldiers who take the siblings hostage in a nearby hunting lodge. Hannibal goes temporarily mute before he’s taken to a brutal Soviet orphanage that solidifies his immunity to cruelty before escaping to Paris where his widowed Japanese Aunt, Lady Murasaki (Gong Li of Memoirs of a Geisha), welcomes him. It isn’t long before Hannibal’s indoctrination into Japanese traditions, French cuisine and medical techniques sends him on a revenge-killing spree unlike any other.

Director Peter Webber (Girl With a Pearl Earring) grabs your attention with a staggering wartime opening sequence that looks like something out of a Paul Verhoeven movie. A fighter plane crashes into a manned Nazi tank near the castle grounds, and production designer Allan Starski (The Pianist) introduces the metallic taste of war. In this way the filmmakers establish an anti-war theme that foreshadows the devastation to come for the surviving victims and their oppressors.

However, it’s here too that the audience members start to be robbed of the own dark and abstract ideas about the incentive to furnish their source of Hannibal’s nefarious desires. As suspense and horror master Alfred Hitchcock taught filmmakers and audiences, the true nature of fright lives in the piqued imagination of the spectator. Using our imaginations to fill in the blanks about the motivations of a Norman Bates or a Hannibal Lecter is half of the fun.

Silence of the Lambs is one of the scariest films of the past 20 years because we are led to contemplate the potential for evil behind the dilated pupils of Anthony Hopkins’ demented character. Hannibal’s capacity for a twisted empathy for Jodie Foster’s perfectly vulnerable Clarice Starling is so unsettling because it suggests a relationship between them and the cryptic serial killer Buffalo Bill that she is trying to locate. Hopkins’ Hannibal penetrates Starling’s psyche and consequently our own subconscious through Foster’s character, our cherished protagonist.

In Hannibal Rising, our protagonist is the killer. With a deep dimple on his left cheek that doubles as a scar of unimaginable origin, Gaspard Ulliel is endlessly watchable. Ulliel’s strikingly handsome features belie the internal wounds of Hannibal’s traumatic childhood that we have witnessed. And so, when a butcher at a public French market insults Lady Murasaki about the direction of her genitalia, we look forward to Hannibal’s bloody revenge that will necessitate the use of a samurai sword in the service of a comical decapitation.

Enter French Inspector Popil (Dominic West) to investigate the murder, and provide the story with a retrograde momentum where the author should have introduced a more powerful element of suspense and dangerous interplay between the characters. Having whetted his appetite for murder, Hannibal hunts down and dispatches the soldiers that cooked his little sister (and who shared the broth of her soup with him). Details about Hannibal’s taste for consuming the cheeks of his victims seem a perfunctory touch, as does his evolving love affair with his aunt, who becomes a willing accomplice to his crimes.

Director of Photography Ben Davis (Layer Cake) creates dense visual compositions that succeed in giving fertile, classical underpinnings to Thomas Harris’ formulaic plot. For all of the story’s lack of suspense and terror, it is Gaspard Ulliel who makes the movie dramatic. His is an audacious performance that bewitches the viewer into relishing something that we should not.

HANNIBAL RISING ( * * )

Directed by Peter Webber. • Starring Gaspard Ulliel and Li Gong. • Rated R, 117 min. • At the Century Cinemas Del Monte Center, Maya Cinemas, Northridge Cinemas.