Movie Review: Hanna (2011)

Hanna is a 16-year-old girl raised by her father to be the perfect killer. Her relentless combat and survival training in a desolate arctic locale has left her emotionless and devoid of remorse and pity - and she's probably the most normal character in the film. Director Joe Wright's latest effort tries so hard to be edgy and different that desperation trumps the minor intrigue brought upon by bizarre characters and situations. The majority of the time, it's just plain weird. Few movies feature a gay, jumpsuit-clad hitman or an oral hygiene-obsessed government agent sporting designer shoes and southern accents - but there's probably a reason for that.

Raised to be a ruthless killing machine, young Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) tirelessly trains in the wilds of Finland with her father Erik (Eric Bana). Readying herself for the inevitable confrontation with Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), the merciless government agent intent on hunting them down, Hanna determines to take a preemptive strike against her opponents and join her father later in Berlin. But when Hanna is tricked into believing she has succeeded, Wiegler hires the sadistic assassin Isaacs (Tom Hollander) to dispose of the young girl. While Erik tries to tie up loose ends and rendezvous with his daughter, Hanna begins to uncover alarming revelations about her past as she attempts to stay one step ahead of her pursuers.

There's a scene early on, in which Hanna must grapple onto the bottom of a military Hummer as it races over the manhole she's peering up from. It's this scene that carelessly topples the suspension of disbelief - her origins, her upbringing and her callous training can all be forgiven, but the Indiana Jones-styled act of clinging to the chassis of a moving vehicle is so utterly unbelievable and ludicrously impossible that it recklessly defines her as more than human. Although her heritage is somewhat of a secret, she's certainly no superhero.

But it's clear from the opening scene that Hanna is trying entirely too hard to be cool. Perhaps the awe of young assassins became controversial with Kick-Ass or derivative from Leon and even La Femme Nikita. The thumping techno music ripped from Collateral, accompanied by the frenetic camerawork from The Bourne Ultimatum or Run Lola Run, doesn't help the situation, stylizing the action and fight choreography to the point of visual nuisance. The notion of giving the villains incredibly peculiar idiosyncrasies is also troubling - Marissa's tooth fetish and Isaacs' need for whistling and hermaphrodite performers is puzzling and unnecessary. Why do the bad guys always have to go out of their way to demonstrate how evil, weird or insane they are? Will we forget them if they're simply villainous?

Hanna's motto is "adapt or die," which doesn't seem to help her when discovering the wonder of a light switch, a showerhead or an electric kettle. She seems too easily startled by harmless things (and oddly preoccupied with flirting over fulfilling her mission) yet totally prepared for bullet mayhem. She spends plenty of time studying picturesque family traditions, human tenderness, and boys; it's a wonder she can compete against the modern warfare of the CIA. At least the playgrounds for action and adventure are fitting, even if the music, mostly created by The Chemical Brothers (except for the classical "In the Hall of the Mountain King," most recently heard in The Social Network and The Greatest Movie Ever Sold) gets in the way of clever presentation.

Movie Review: Hanna

This movie appears to have been created by a visionary who decided to show the dark side of fairy tales, add a graphic element of gore to the fairy tale, and then modernize the fairy tale. This combination leads to a more surreal action movie that is soulful and draws in the audience.

But does the audience really want to be drawn in to pay full attention to a movie that is so gory and sad? A viewer that prefers violent movies like action movies can handle the darkness of this movie because this movie seems too unreal to impact the viewer's emotions more than it does. Also, Hanna does not have too much gore for a PG-13 rating.

The movie also appears unreal and modern because of its action movie format and cutting edge soundtrack. This movie is not modern in any ways that could make it seem more familiar to the audience. It just happens to have contemporary settings and modern Hollywood methods of telling the story. Hanna's modernity just adds to its surreality.

The film's modernity also makes it seem even more otherworldly, and this other worldliness creates the feelings and state of mind that come with fairy tales even more than fairy tales can do that for an audience. At times, the modern qualities of the film create a sense that Hanna is like someone in the viewer's world. This makes viewing the movie more of a soulful experience than a fairy tale.

Hanna just has storybook qualities too much to be like a storybook film. It is too dark, soulful, and otherworldly to be like a fairytale. This movie creates the wonder, sadness, and fear in the viewer that an overly sensitve child may feel after seeing and hearing a fairy tale without hearing the happy ending.

Hanna herself represents the merging of an action movie with the fairytale. She is both the innocent fairy tale heroine and the noble storybook warrior with magical powers. Since this is also a modern action movie, this warrior has powers from the scientific magic of manipulated DNA instead of powers from unexplained magical forces or a wizard.

The amazing warrior powers inside the waify teenage girl make the film cartoonish and depressing at certain points. The action sequences with Hanna are needed to accommodate every modern movie goer's short attention span, but the action sequences also make the movie seem cartoonish or silly. The silly action sequences also make it painfully clear that a childlike teenage girl has to fend for herself until she triumphs at the end of this film. That is a depressing realization.

There is also something else that seems silly in this movie. The villain has a syrupy Texan accent that is either her real accent or the accent that she may have used to convince others that she is someone else. The Texan accent seems silly because there is no explanation for it in the film. It is a distraction that seems like a poor acting choice by Cate Blanchett, the actress portraying the villain. It could be a poor choice made by the screenwriter or the director instead of the actress.

Cate Blanchett appears to be a brilliant actor apart from her confusing and distracting southern accent. All of the other actors in Hanna outperform her. Saoirse Ronan portrays Hanna using a limited range of personal expression. However, the flat portrayal of Hanna seems more realistic for the character and it is a better fit for the character.

There is one outstanding acting performance in Hanna. Eric Bana deserves a best actor nomination at the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes for his portrayal of Hanna's father. He portrays a complicated and potentially insane character who is multifaceted. That combination of traits makes Eric Bana's character incredibly difficult to portray accurately onscreen. Eric Bana brings his character to the movie screen perfectly.

The most outstanding aspect of this film is its artistic direction. Hanna's scenery is not only beautiful, it is also fantastic because it is avant garde. The artistic direction is not just captivating, it also helps to illustrate the story line. This film deserves the 2012 Academy Award for best direction. It is impossible for another film to outperform Hanna in that category this year.

Hanna is not a perfect film, but it might be the movie of this year. Hanna is comparable to Inception because it is an action film that has too much depth to be like other action films.