What's eating Hannibal? Psychoanalysis is hard to digest.

No matter when in the week your garbage is picked up, the arrival of "Hannibal Rising" at your megaplex guarantees that it's trash day somewhere.

Formerly masterful novelist Thomas Harris continues to pimp out the serial-killing cannibal he (and Anthony Hopkins) made famous, adapting his recent novel for the screen. The movie drags us back to the Lithuania of World War II, where we learn that the spark for Hannibal's murderous zeal is the Nazis. Who else?

The news is completely dubious. But the movie runs with it anyway.

We watch a particularly vicious pack of mongrel Eastern Bloc militiamen descend on Lecter Castle. The only survivors are young Hannibal and his itsy-bitsy sister Mischa, whom the men eventually boil and eat. So that's how it all began!

As if to say, "Look at how restrained we can be," the movie spares us the specifics, promptly flashing forward eight years, where a vengeful teenage Hannibal is now played by the 22-year-old Frenchman Gaspard Ulliel. His accent is vague, but those glowers and smirks could kill -- although probably not quite as well as all the swords and cutlery deployed here. (Early on at a Soviet orphanage, a delighted Hannibal wields a sickle in the film's loudest symbolism alert.)

The plot speeds our protagonist from Eastern Europe to Paris, by way of train, truck bed, and line-drawn-across-a-map montage. In France, he lands at the country chateau of his uncle. The uncle is dead, but, boy, is his widow alive. Her name is Lady Murasaki, and brave Gong Li phonetically feels her way through another stupid, sexed-up role in English.

This woman could use a "Volver" right about now. Until then, she's here, teaching Hannibal the ways of the samurai (call it "Kill Billions"), following him to medical school, and digging him out of jams. When he's stuck in an interrogation with an inspector (Dominic West), for instance, she conveniently sticks the head of the victim on a gatepost across from the police station. Phew.

At some point those Nazis resurface, led by a slithering Rhys Ifans, and Hannibal uses them to perfect his nascent culinary skills. Anyone curious about what the good doctor was cooking back in the day will get a mouthful. ("Cheeks" is the word.)

Director Peter Webber ("Girl With a Pearl Earring") and his crew give "Hannibal Rising" a clean, professional look. For better and worse, the movie is more attractive and competently assembled than its schlock peers.

That's refreshing, but it hardly excuses the appalling lack of suspense, intermittent tastelessness, or shockingly low camp quotient.

In writing the screenplay, Harris left out much of the novel's good stuff, including lines like this one from Lady Murasaki to Hannibal: "If you are scorched earth, I will be warm rain." Three decades after "Red Dragon" and " The Silence of the Lambs" gave the world a Lecter of chilling psychological darkness, Harris is prostituting himself to the teen-horror market with a younger, more athletic man-eater. His desperation has its amusements. It's funny watching an author try to retrofit a monster with moral relativism.

Nonetheless, Dr. Lecter offers us nothing new in the way of lethal ingenuity. As a gourmand, though, it's a different story. Hannibal might have overstayed his welcome in the horror genre, but he could rehab his tarnished star the way other diminished celebrities have -- with a stint on a reality television show. The next season of "Top Chef" would suddenly be very interesting.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog/.