Hanna

Hanna

             Hanna has all the ingredients of a movie that I wanted to love.  It has the morbid fairy tale atmosphere of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale, sprinkled with the stylish euro-intrigue of a ‘La Femme Nikita’, and topped off with the international action espionage of ‘The Bourne Identity’.  Throw in a protagonist who, for all intents and purposes, has super powers, then how could I not love this film? Somehow the movie does not bring all these ingredients together in a satisfying manner.

            Seeing the trailers for this and even the opening scene of the movie, I was very excited.  However the movie just doesn’t deliver as well as I had hoped.  Perhaps my expectations were too high, but this movie fell short.  That doesn’t mean the movie didn’t have good qualities and interesting moments.

            The movie opens in the snow covered wilderness of Finland with an animal skin clad 16 year-old Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) hunting a buck with a bow and arrow.  Saoirse is ethereally beautiful as Hanna and brings a woodland fairy quality to the role.  Soon after skillfully killing the buck a mysterious man sneaks up behind her and exclaims ‘You’re dead!’. What follows is a fight sequence that demonstrates Hanna’s incomparable skill and sets the pace for the rest of the movie.

            The man turns out to be her father, Erik Keller (played by Eric Bana).  Her father has raised Hanna in the remotes of Finland and trained her to be a killing machine.  Erik is trying to escape his super spy past and hide and prepare Hanna as long as possible before ‘they’ eventually find them.  The Finnish scenery is beautiful and their woodland shack is straight out of the aforementioned Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  However; Hanna is an adolescent and becoming restless.  The home schooling she receives is not enough to satisfy her desire to see the world or to know someone else besides her father.  Erik leaves the choice to her to reenter the world with the warning that the woman who killed her mother is still after them and will stop at nothing to kill her.

            The woman who killed Hanna’s mother (and attempted to with her and her father for that matter) is a CIA officer named Marissa (played by Cate Blanchett).  As soon as Hanna and her father come back on the grid, she dispatches agents to capture them.  For reasons I’m not sure I understand, Erik leaves his daughter to be captured while he sets a date to meet her in Germany.  Hanna is captured with much difficulty and it isn’t long before Marissa realizes what a formidable killing machine the 16 year old Hanna is.

            I think this is where the movie could have gotten better, but took a downward turn in many respects.  The action sequences were shot in jerky, hard to follow sequences.  The music choice of house techno music detracted from the scenes and you ended up with all the aesthetics of a strobe light going off on a night club dance floor.  After escaping, Hanna finds herself in Morocco and must travel cross continent to make it to her pre-arranged rendez-vous with her father in Germany.   I feel there is much that could be explored here, but wasn’t.  Hanna stumbles across a family of English hippies (at least the parents were, the kids were endlessly embarrassed by them) and Hanna makes her first friend with their daughter.  This dynamic provided some of the movies better moments as Hanna struggles to feel what normal feels like and relate to someone her own age when she has never met anyone other than her father.

            Marissa sends villainous, yet cartoonish, euro assassins after her and the rest of the movie is Hanna avoiding and killing them on her journey to the mythical land of Berlin to meet her father.  Marissa is cold and calculating with an ‘evil step-mother’ vibe that adds to the already fairy tale quality of the movie.  As the movie progresses, you learn the history of Erik and Marissa and how everything is not as it appears.  Ultimately, no one is innocent (except Hanna) and the world of espionage is not populated with the pure-hearted (but we already knew that).

            Perhaps I’m being unfairly harsh on this movie as I had high expectations, but one measure I judge a movie by is if I’m waiting for it to end.  If a movie is good, it is over before I’m ready.  With this movie, I was checking the time through out, hoping it was almost over.  I will give it props for being a stylish and having a great concept.  I just can’t recommend it.

I rate this movie ** stars