Once upon a time there was a young girl named Hanna (Saoirse Ronan), whose father Erik (Eric Bana) trained her to kill. Her target was CIA section head Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), who had a falling out with Erik many years ago. Erik taught Hanna several languages, fatal hand-to-hand maneuvers and all the other perks that come from being a former CIA agent. Now, Hanna says she’s “ready”, flips a control node on and watches an assault team take her in while her father dons a suit and begins a trap-laden trip to Germany, where he will meet his daughter after “the witch is dead”. Wiegler doesn’t know that she is a target, but when Hanna breaks out of the holding facility with a pile of bodies in her wake, Marissa gives chase, aided by a team of off-the-books skinhead hooligans.
Joe Wright’s new film, Hanna, is a long way off from the director’s typical large canvas emotions-run-wild work. Nevertheless, Wright’s stylistic flourishes both distinguish and diminish Hanna’s impact. Hanna is a stylish film that occasionally comes to a halt and attempts to stir up some unearned emotional depths. Aided by a mean, bass-heavy, propulsive score by The Chemical Brothers, Alwin H. Kuchler’s pirouetting camer, and breathlessly intense (if somewhat aritifical) editing by Wright regular Paul Tothill, Hanna has all the makings of a solid genre offering that just misses your heart.
Erik has given Hanna all the tools a killer might need – but none of the understanding to prepare her for a noisy world filled with words, sounds and people she’s never seen before. Oddball fits of comedy pop up as our lanky assassin makes fast friends with typical teen Sophie (the excellent Jessica Barden), whose cynical prattling is among the truest emotions in the film – the wide-eyed Hanna bonds with Sophie over an awkward double date, a deadly young woman forced to confront a childhood lost. Whether that could have been an emotional anchor will never be known, as it is tossed to the side and the kinetic third act wastes no time delivering most of the answers to the mystery of Hanna and Blanchett’s Marissa Viegler’s pathological pursuit of the girl.
Many of my colleagues have skewered Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, and Mr. Snyder in particular, calling his work juvenile and stylistically overdone. Now those same critics are leveling praise on Joe Wright’s work despite it suffering from many of the same maladies. Unlike Snyder’s film however, Wright plays everything deadly serious and small-scale.
Credit here is due to the cast, in particular Saoirse Ronan, who will soon cement her position as an actress to be reckoned with. Her dedication to the role is exciting and free of the smart-ass winking that almost stripped Hit-Girl of any empathetic qualities. Like Ms. Moretz in Kick Ass, Ronan finds a center to her character and runs with it. She makes Hanna work in spite of a film awash in exacting visual style.
Bana and Blanchett don’t acquit as well, but that’s no insult to these two great actors – they do their best with what they have to work with, with Bana racing from Finland to Germany and engaging in convincing combat during a one-shot-one-take sequence that ran out of steam years ago – Wright’s own Dunkurk sequence was a major issue I had with Atonement and here this technique feels wholly unnecessary. Blanchett is an artist of the highest caliber and this role is not well suited for her at all – she needs more flesh on Viegler but instead settles for a forceful woman defined by two or three eccentricities.
The score by The Chemical Brothers is excellent and noticeable, since Wright amplifies each sound for effect. I’ll reserve judgment on whether Hanna works as a feminist film, but I will say that whatever themes are touched on in the film are subdued, offered up as a sacrifice for a stylist running wild. I don’t deny Mr. Wright’s natural talent behind the camera, but Hanna makes me lament his uncoordinated leveraging of story for the sake of style.
"Hanna" opens April 8, 2011 and is rated PG13. Action, Adventure. Directed by Joe Wright. Written by Seth Lochhead and David Farr. Starring Cate Blanchett, Eric Bana, Saoirse Ronan, Vicky Krieps.
