Hanna
HANNA
UNIVERSAL
RELEASED 6 May 2011
I love ‘Leon’. Marking the first screen appearance of Natalie Portman (and still her best?), as well as introducing audiences to Jean Reno as ‘the cleaner’ and Gary Oldman as your go-to man if you need a total psychopath, it’s Luc Besson’s best film, and is ludicrously rewatchable.
Seeing as ‘Leon’ was released in 1996, it’s been a long time coming for another ‘young girl becomes a trained assassin’ movie. Hey, doesn’t this sort of thing happen all the time? So it’s come to ‘Atonement’ director Joe Wright to break out the hardware and bring some femme-tastic ass-kicking to our screens.
Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) has been brought up in a snowy German forest by her former CIA trained-assassin father Erik (Eric Bana). He’s trained her to shoot deer, fight like a devil, and be able to recite vast sections of the Encyclopedia. No internet in the forest of course. When the time comes to avenge her mother, Hannah allows herself to be captured by the CIA, as her father escapes, so that she can kill CIA bigwig Marissa (Cate Blanchett) and rendez-vous with her father in Berlin.
Good things first. Ronan is icily cool as the unflappable teenage assassin, having an other-worldy look with her bleached-blonde hair and eyebrows. Eric Bana does a good job as the hitman daddy, with Bana and Ronan getting a couple of nicely-choreographed fight scenes.
The Chemical Brothers have scored the entire movie, and amongst some expected bouncy numbers, there’s a poetic theme tune for Hanna.
Cate Blanchett is perhaps not quite the devastating actress she usually is, but I felt that was mainly down to her irritating Texan accent. It didn’t sound off, just very grating. Olivia Williams and Jason Flemyng bring a few laughs to the movie as travelling holidaymakers who take Hanna in for a while. When they ask how Hanna’s mother died, they get the reply, ‘three bullets’. Tom Hollander is also quite repulsive as the creepy thug.
Wright has directed everything with style and some visual flair, but sadly there’s an area at which he has wholeheartedly failed, and that’s in the action scenes. I don’t know if you could exactly call ‘Hanna’ an action movie, but it does feature quite a lot of action, and although it’s smoothly photographed, there is zero tension or evidence of pacing in any of the scenes. My pulse wasn’t raised on one single occasion, and that’s pretty criminal when the action scenes have some nice ideas in them. Put this movie in the hands of Kathryn Bigelow, or Luc Besson himself, and I’m pretty certain it would have been a thrilling ride. In Wright’s hands, it’s all far too self-concious and preening. The movie doesn’t break into a sweat, and I like my action movies dripping with it.
The story of ‘Hanna’ is unsurprising too, and the script never does anything original. In fact, the key lines of the film felt pretty safe.
For such a glossy movie, ‘Hanna’ ends up being nothing more than a flick through a glossy travel magazine. Lovely photos, with the words less than important. And for Joe Wright, although it’s nice to see him try something different, he’s definitely not an action director.
THREE OUT OF FIVE
