“I just missed your heart.”
So goes the opening line of Joe Wright’s latest thriller, delivered by a brutal and trained killer, adept with arrow, knife, firearm and fist – a 16 year-old girl named Hanna. Yes, isn’t it always the way that you wait ages for juvenile lady assassins to turn up, and then they arrive in pairs? Last year we were treated to the tremendously stylised comic-book butchery of Hit Girl, but there’s a more serious edge to Saoirse Ronan’s badass than the purple-haired moppet with a machete in Kick Ass. The Irish actress, whose piercing blue eyes would even make Daniel Craig flinch, here takes on her biggest role to date, in a trippy and pounding thriller that reads just like a neo fairytale.
Once upon a time there was a little girl who got wiped off the grid. Instead of playing with dollies and riding a bike, she’s been conditioned to be the perfect killer by her rogue CIA Agent father (Eric Bana). She’s drilled daily, trained and pushed to the extreme in the formidable frosts of Arctic Finland by this unyielding man, and she’s become his acolyte, fluent in numerous languages, ready to strike, even in her sleep. And so they set a trap, all in the name of slaying the big bad wolf, a seductively shifty Cate Blanchett, who’s CIA bigwig Marissa watches events unfold through her mirror-mirror-on-the-wall cameras, all the better to see Hanna with when she goes on the run. A fairy godmother comes in the shape of a surrogate sister from a new age travelling family, and there are secrets, skinhead henchmen, and pumping techno beats, and like Hanna says, it just misses your heart and flies wide of the target.
Hanna is a decisive film, likely to split its audience down the line of those who buy into its darkly modern fantasy, and those left out in the Finnish cold. There’s no denying it’s well acted, with Bana never better, all commanding and conflicted, and Blanchett absorbing as the southern drawling Marissa, a terror in a two-piece who’s likely to turn you off flossing for life. Tom Hollander, the diminutive British character actor, crackles as Isaacs the German thug, a man who’ll do the unmentionable things that the CIA won’t. And Ronan once again proves she’s someone to watch, dominating the film as a real physical presence in her action scenes, but showing a dramatic deftness when it comes to filling an emotionless butcher with unrestrained feelings.
Equally there’s nothing wrong with the direction. Joe Wright once again shows visual flair, particularly with his panning and pumping action scenes (Daddy in an U-Bahn station, daughter in a lorry depot) that pack a real cinematic punch, because you can actually see where the punches land. The locations are appropriate, with this fairytale Germany muted and industrial, and yes, decidedly grim, but with flashes of bright colour in Morocco and Spain as Hanna finds herself and begins to value the life she’s never led.
That Hanna just doesn’t add up to the sum of its parts makes it all the more disappointing. Brilliant in parts, it begins to lose momentum in its final arc and suffers from some missteps (Hanna is baffled by a TV one minute, then Googling like a pro two days later) and a rushed ending. Perhaps the most frustrating is that fairytales have a neat conclusion, but here it’s only half-truth revelations without the promise of resolution.
3 ½ Likes.
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