Review of Hanna (2011) by Waengus — 03 Jun 2011

For those who enjoy this kind of thing, it begins promisingly. In the snowy Finnish wilderness, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan), delicate-faced but deathly as a Valkyrie, brings down a caribou with her bow and arrow. As she bends to her kill, a male voice behind her says: 'You're dead.' Unsurprisingly, this pronouncement is meant hypothetically. Her father, Erik (Eric Bana), is determined to keep his daughter on her toes by ambushing her at any opportunity (like Kato Fong in The Pink Panther). After a brief, martial artsy exchange, he leaves her lying in the snow, telling her she can bring back the caribou herself. As she eviscerates the animal, we begin to see one possible reason for this beautiful location; blood and intestines are so much more striking when shot against snow. As if to emphasise this, the scene closes with an aerial zoom-out of Hanna on her back, exhausted, lying against the gutted carcass. To begin with the plot is laughably absurd: rogue CIA agent Erik raises his daughter in a Grimm's fairytale cabin in the wilderness in order to groom her to kill CIA boss Marissa (Cate Blanchette) who killed his wife. This aside, the film has a whole slew of inconsistencies. One of the most glaring is Erik's failure, despite his intensive education programme, to introduce his daughter to some of the most basic aspects of city life, such as TV and, em, electricity. Another weirdness is that at the start of the film Hanna is well-trained in the lethal arts, taking out a number of the special forces unit that arrives to capture her (again inconsistently, since being captured is her objective); later, at the secret base where she'd held, she kills a few more guys, including the hapless woman who is sent in to interrogate her. All well and good, I suppose, but later in the film, while she's on the run through various countries, her super-powered inner assassin all but abandons her, culminating in a comically ridiculous scene that has her being chased by campy hit man Isaacs (Tom Hollander) and his dorky looking skinhead side-kicks.

This is comic-strip territory of course. When you enter the cinema (or buy a DVD) to view such a flick you are in effect paying for an invisible string attached to an invisible hot air balloon attached (hopefully) to your disbelief. However, after some initial tugging, mine stubbornly refused to lift. Give me Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy any day Saoirse Ronan has been justifiably praised for her acting (the directing is the problem) and Eric Bana is believable enough. Cate Blanchette as Marissa (or the White Witch) is pretty dire; she goes through the motions, not that she's allowed that many, coming across as a mannikin with a frozen smile. Like many other critics, Philip French has likened Hanna to Jason Bourne. Writing in The Observer, he concludes that 'the overall effect is polished, weightless and forgettable.' Weightless and forgettable maybe, but 'polished' suggests to me a rather different kind of film, one in which the clunky working parts are kept firmly below the bonnet. The Bourne series achieves this with some distinction, managing to be both weightless and memorable. Compared to those films, Hanna is a bone-shaker with pretensions, a risible mess.