Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

Wordiezett So much average

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Ava-Grace Willis Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

clanciai There are four things for which this film is worth seeing and remembering: Victor Mature as Hannibal, the crossing of the Alps with live elephants, the meticulously reconstructed battle of Cannae, and a magnificent score by Carlo Rustichelli. The story isn't bad with the loyalty conflicts of Fabius' niece joining hands with Hannibal the number one enemy of Rome and ultimately abandoning him to return to Rome, which doesn't thank her for it, but, as so often in Ulmer's films, the dialogue does not come alive and fails to flow. The actors aren't bad, but the script is not good enough for therm. It's a great story, and it's even greater when you consider that only half of it is told here, the rest of Hannibal's career was perhaps even more dramatic than the first part up to his greatest glory at the victory of Cannae, which is the only part this film has bothered to screen. Victor Mature was always an impressing actor but was unfortunately burdened by scripts that kept him confined to beefy heroes for the display of muscles and knuckles in extensive fisticuffs, so it's only seldom he was allowed to actually be the great actor he was. He almost gets through here, like in John Ford's "My Darling Clementine". Gabriele Ferzetti is excellent as Fabius, he has really studied this character carefully, and Rita Gam also makes the best of it, but she was better in Nicholas Ray's "King of Kings" as the lewd Herodias.This is one of the better Peplum films, they were produced en masse in the fifties up to "The Fall of the Roman Empire", and their number tended to spoil them, give them a bad reputation as only spectacular superficialities, which ultimately made them disappear losing their good box office standing, but a few of them are worth rediscovering for re-evaluation and exoneration. This was one of them, mainly for the sake of Victor Mature.

Dee Mou Those of you who read my reviews know that I love the old classics -- mostly because I think that real screen acting was born and made by that generation. They made their characters larger than life and knew how to win our hearts doing it. Ok, going back to HANNIBAL and his elephants, Victor Mature does a remarkable job as as title character, making us love and even root for the historical figure who has always been considered a very unrelenting sort of fellow since childhood. The performance gives us a small peek into a more human side. Highly recommending the film.

Leofwine_draca HANNIBAL is an average kind of sword and sandal epic put out by the Italians. It lacks the budget to do justice to the big historical battles and it gets bogged down in some tacked-on romantic melodrama which I don't remember reading about in the histories, but at least it looks colourful and exciting. Victor Mature plays the Carthaginian general who leads his army across the Alps to attack Rome, and yes, he brings his elephants along. There are only two or three scenes with said elephants but they're handled very well and the best parts of the picture. This is the kind of film which is entertaining when depicting action but slightly dull for the rest of the time. Terence Hill and Bud Spencer star, years before they went on to be big names in the spaghetti western genre.

Blueghost I don't know who the hell shot this, but I suppose I could glance at the credits and lay blame on the culprits, but since I'm lazy and irritated right now I'll just skip the formality and say that Victor Mature probably fired his agent several times over after being booked for this gig.He is quite literally the only competent person thesping his role, all the while other actors are stiff, comical, and otherwise just plain unconvincing. But like I implied in my first paragraph, it's not even the acting (however bad by the supporting cast) that's the issue: It's the cinematography: It's the direction and shot set ups: It's poor scheduling of the extras so the most can be gotten out of them shot wise. It's everything from the awful costumes to the lack of historical accuracy, to the extreme lack of consistent production values.The battle scenes are so poorly staged that you wonder who the hell was in charge of this thing. The acting, as mentioned, by all other than the lead (Mature) is some of the worst I've seen for a feature film. It's that bad.Avoid this thing.