Hannibal Lecter’s journey from man-monster of mystery to avenging angel anti-hero is completed in “Hannibal Rising,” the new movie from the new Thomas Harris novel.

This is the installment in the tale that deigns to tell us how “Hannibal the Cannibal” developed his love of Japanese samurai iconography and his taste for fava beans. It’s the back story, about the World War II atrocities that twisted this child of nobility into a man of sophisticated palate with an eye for fine cutlery.

But “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.

A prologue set in Lithuania in the final winter of World War II tells us of Hannibal’s childhood, the way his parents died and the sister he wanted to protect, but could not. He and his sister run afoul of cutthroats who set the hideous plot in motion with a heinous crime.

Then, actor Gaspard Ulliel takes over, eight years later, a defender of the weak haunted by the last night of his sister’s life. He sets about avenging the sister, the family and the soul he lost.

There are more unspeakable crimes, which we know that Hannibal, by “The Silence of the Lambs,” cannot stop speaking of. There’s another cop (Dominic West, bland) being led to “the real criminals” by Lecter.

“If you kill in France, I will see your head in a bucket!” he vows.

Gong Li plays Hannibal’s too-sexy guardian, the Japanese widow of his uncle. She teaches him swordsmanship and Japanese aesthetics. She is his conscience here. He needs one.

Rhys Ifans is the lip-smacking leader of the ex-Lithuanian Nazi sympathizers who have hidden their crimes and moved on to lives as Soviet officials, French cafe owners or gun and slave smugglers.

It’s a movie of blood and entrails – human and animal – crimsons and grays in a 1950s France where the guilty hide and thrive in plain sight among the survivors of their victims. Director Peter Webber (“The Girl With the Pearl Earring”) helped find an appropriate look for the film but does nothing to build suspense or make the vengeance-killings anything other than graphic.

The script is where Harris, the novelist-as-screenwriter, tidies up the “filler” from the book, stripping details such as Hannibal’s intellectual training, the stolen artwork that (in the book) leads him to the villains. Those embellishments are sorely missed, as without them, the film is merely a methodical killing machine.

Both movie and book have the odor of a gilded cage, where Harris, who upped the ante in this whole strain of pop culture monsters, sits in the dark and counts his blood money.

But it all might make for at least a watchable horror film – for that is all this aspires to be – were it not for the lead, a dull Frenchman who imitates (poorly) Hopkins’ later cadences and menacing scowl. Ulliel (“Brotherhood of the Wolf”) is physically right, but a bore.

Which you could say about the movie, too.