“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.
