Review of Hanna (2011) by Shiira — 11 May 2011

The hunter pursues a caribou, no doubt bewildered by the size and sex of his attacker. The caribou will pay for underestimating his attacker. Hanna(Sairose Ronan) knows her way around a bow and arrow. But on this particular chase, the girl, uncharacteristically, is imprecise with her aim, so unusual for this Finlander, whom you suspect doesn't miss her mark often.

It's not a kill shot, so the Arctic deer staggers away, bloodying the snow in a vain attempt at escaping from the conspicuously young archer. With no fight left in him, Hanna catches up to the wounded animal, who is still breathing, having nothing but a mercy killing to look forward to.

Standing over the caribou, the words that tumble out of her mouth aren't what you'd expect. The words are barbed, without empathy; words that convey no regard for the vanquished animal. She taunts her prey, telling the deer, "I just missed your heart," before blowing him away to smithereens with two gunshot blasts.

No communion exists between Hanna and the wildlife she hunts down; for example, this quadruped, because the girl is godless and incapable of feeling remorse, only triumph. Not being the least bit squeamish, Hanna makes an incision in the carcass and rips out its entrails, while the proud father(Eric Bana), the girl's handler, watches from afar, congratulating himself for his hand in creating this perfect monster; a cold, efficient killing machine.

Kuusamo doesn't believe in tears. What's up with all these murderous little girls? Jaume Collet-Serra's "Orphan", anyone? It wasn't so long ago that such unladylike behavior would have been deemed unthinkable.

As recently as 1991, there still existed a persistence of boundaries which precluded females(of all ages) with homicidal intentions from committing acts of violence considered too graphic. For instance, in Luc Besson's "La Femme Nikita", the government-trained assassin(played by Milla Jonovich) chooses not to shoot a dog, but instead, runs out of the room before she's finished with taking the necessary photographs to complete her mission.

With each passing year, Nikita(renamed Josephine by the government) seems more and more demure. Nowadays, given the same situation, the dog would surely get it between the eyes, especially after Matthew Vaughn's taboo-breaking "Kick-Ass", in which the divide between both sexes, and more notably, the chronological age that differentiates children from adults, have all been but obliterated by the blood-drenched spectacle of Hit Girl's precociously sociopathic masculinity.

Whereas the hyper-violent U.K. take on the superhero film portrays the grrrl-murderess stylings of Chloe Moretz as cute and adorable, "Hanna" treats the titular character's homicides a little more soberly, but like Mindy, the little girl who came in from the cold shares that same comportment of desensitization towards violence.

Even worse, Hanna kills, on more than one occasion, what appears to be innocent CIA agents, most notably, the woman disguised as Marissa, whom the pint-sized assassin, soon after producing crocodile tears, cruelly dispatches of in mid-clinch, snapping the masquerading woman's neck with her bare hands.

Unlike "Kick-Ass", whose facetious attempts at humanizing Hit Girl plays like comedy, Hanna' softer side, coaxed out of her by the vacationing family she meets while roaming the dry Moroccan terrain, is a genuine effort on the filmmaker's part of transforming this anti-hero into a sympathetic figure.

However, there's no getting around the fact that Hanna is indeed a cold-blooded killer, capable of disposing the innocent and the guilty alike in equal measure, as evidenced by her plaintively stating the line on Marissa(Cate Blanchett) with the same dispassionate tone that she had used on the caribou in the film's waning moments.

Hanna is absolutely inscrutable, practically a cipher for the film's sick fantasy. In the Besson follow-up "The Professional", Mathilde(played by a thirteen-year-old Natalie Portman), a hit girl wanna-be, asks her mentor Leon, "Can we use real bullets now?" after she shoots a random stranger from long-distance using a paint gun.

Further along in the film, she walks into a building carrying a paper bag full of weapons with the intention of avenging the man who had killed her family, but alas, she never gets to use them. The audience just wasn't ready for such mayhem being performed by a child.

Some of us still can't help but wince at the mere thought.