Hanna - Film Review

Quiet easy to mislabel with deceptive press and blurbs, Joe Wright's high octane thriller is not the simple gimmick action flick you may have been lead to believe. It is, however, highly uncoventional.

Wunderkid Saorise Ronan is the Hanna of the title, a sixteen year old German girl living with her ex-CIA operative father, Erik Heller (Eric Bana) in isolation at their Finnish woodland cabin. She has never seen electricity, internet, or another person's face. Instead, her years have been spent going through intensive survival, combat and linguistic training, all with one specific mission in mind. To kill her father's former boss, Marissa Viegler (Cate Blanchett).

After concoting a plan that will see Hanna surrender herself to a search team when they locate their hideaway, in order to get inside the system, and then meet her father in Berlin after her mission is done, she is thrust into a strange military base in the desert, it's iron doors and multiple cameras completely alien to her. Despite the culture shock, she completes her objective, before making a daring escape, fleeing into the harsh terrain of a mystery location.
Little does she know, however, that the woman she killed was a double, and it is ever more clear to Viegler that Hanna has to die. Concerned also at the fugitive status of Heller, she takes off after her old colleague, dispatching flamboyant homosexual assassin Isaacs (Tom Hollander) and his skinhead lackies after the girl.

Using her fluency in multiple languages and immense fitness to mount a continent scaling roadtrip, Hanna encounters and befriends a British holidaying family, comprising daughter Sophie (Jessica Barden), son Miles (Aldo Maland), and mother and father (Olivia Williams and Jason Flemying), and subsequently befriends Sophie, and uses that newly found friendship for hijacking purposes as she heads for Europe. Along the way, she discovers shocking facts about her existence and origins, while stuck in a world she does not know.

It's fairly clear from the offset, with the film's title flashing up as a bizzare, childlike rendering, that Hanna will not follow the tropes and rules of similar movies, although at it's heart it is a good old fashioned romp. While the script is quirky, it is in the direction and presentation that the film develops a uniqueness which mainstream helmers strive for. While the jump cuts and sharp editing may be standard, the use of angles, stylish slow motion and unusual camera focus give it a strange world vibe, completely in tune with the story, and also dollops out the eccentricity for each of the characters (the only straight archetypes are pretty disposable). The pounding, piercing soundtrack from the Chemical Brothers (another odd choice) adds both pace and beat, as well as injecting a sense of stress of strife.

The film also provides a very diffirent challenging proposition for the prodiguous Saorise Ronan, a young actress who fits the role like a glove and brings a fractured humanity and emotional, naive vulnerability to the near super human teenager. Much of the film, particularly in the climax and with the revelations about her background, hinges on her holding the audience's sympathy, and as dysfuntional as she is, you want her to see it through. Maternal and paternal instincts don't always apply to films we watch, so this is a crux. Also of note in the young actors department is Jessica Barden who, based on her humurous and authentic showing here, is destined for a big future.

The grown ups also fair well, with Eric Bana sympathetic and charismatic as the mysterious father who clearly has not divulged all facts to give, and Tom Hollander both funny and creepy as the psychotic, ridiculous Isaacs. His introduction is the most bizzare that will ever be given to a hired killer for years. Cate Blanchett, though steely and conflicted as the dark agent Marissa, does occasionally struggle with her probably unneccessary Southern drawl, but makes up for it in more significant departments. Olivia Williams and Jason Flemying are solid, as you would expect.

But the film has a character of it's own, a highly unconventional approach to a fairly ludicrous story, which is perhaps the most appropriate way to approach the picture. Played straight, it would be too daft. Played for laughs, it would be too camp, too corny and frankly out of place. Instead it goes for a mix, creating a bizzare hybrid in mood reminscent of Ravenous, which always pushes itself into different areas. It's a little like watching a gung-ho adventure directed by an arthouse auteur, which in many ways is what's happened here.

A little confusing for the sensibilites, and on occasion rupturing plausability, Hanna has the double bonus of being both entertaining and intoxicating, creating it's own identity and dealing with a spectrum of themes and recurring notions. Somehow a thoughtful, challenging conspiracy thriller married to a high octane chase action blockbuster. Mindless, it ain't.

7/10