The conceit Kick-Ass purported to explore with the character of Hit Girl was what would happen if a real-life expert soldier raised a daughter in his own lethal image. Subtract all the comic-book referencing and hyperbole, hone in on Hit Girl and Pa, and you have Joe Wright’s Hanna, an engrossing but aimless jumble of ideas and conventions with a new spin on the well-worn movie cliché of genetic augmentation for combat purposes.
Hanna begins in silence, its young heroine (Saoirse Ronan) hunting prey with a bow against a pristine arctic landscape. She lives in a makeshift house in the Finnish forest with her father, Erik Heller (Eric Bana), who has been teaching her all her life about combat, geography, language (we see her converse comfortably in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic), and Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), the CIA operative determined to kill her.
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Hanna Directed by Joe Wright. |
Erik’s rigorous focus comes at the expense of what is pleasurable and (to a regular person) practical: Hanna has no understanding of music, little experience with electricity, and an abiding fascination with Grimm’s Fairytales, seemingly her only window onto fiction or fantasy.
Deeming his protégé ready, Erik gives her a transmitter which he says will bring Wiegler and the CIA down on their heads, and then disappears into the wilderness with a vague plan to meet Hanna later on in Berlin.
As a plot it is nothing short of nonsense, but it serves to motivate Hanna’s introduction to and exploration of the great wide world, a reframing of Stranger in a Strange Land that sees her accompanying a family of tourists whose garrulous, uninhibited daughter, Sophie (Jessica Barden), reinforces Hanna’s understanding that she has been missing out on a great deal of what life has to offer.
With a lively sense of humour ranging from the benign to the fiendishly morbid, Hanna mixes sensitive scenes (including a few moments of adolescent intimacy between Hanna and Sophie that would make Catherine Breillat proud) with fairly brutal killings, a number of them painstakingly choreographed and set to thumping techno music by the Chemical Brothers.
As Wiegler, Blanchett gets to have fun playing an antagonist so severe she brushes her teeth bloody, but her mercenary delegates steal the show, both in terms of time on-screen and sheer looniness: Isaacs (Tom Hollander) and his two henchmen, who spend the film in pursuit of Hanna, are an accented trio of skinheads who seem inexplicably to be the precise template after which The Big Lebowski’s marauding nihilists were patterned.
When the inevitable "super soldier" terminology crops up, the revelation is notably uninteresting, nearly irrelevant, and thankfully brief. It also represents the film’s missed opportunity to say anything about the damaged father figure who raised his daughter to "adapt or die" and to kill repeatedly and remorselessly.
With her super-powered genome and lifelong training, Hanna could just as well (and perhaps more insightfully) have been twisted away from some more innocuous if not altruistic purpose as simply a stronger, healthier human being. Instead, we get a groan-worthy scene in which Isaacs asks Wiegler whether Hanna has turned out as she hoped, eliciting the response, "No – better."
But in the meantime, Hanna serves up generous helpings of gorgeous cinematography, wry humour (Sophie’s passing observations are riotous), and hyperkinetic action sequences reminiscent of Pierre Morel’s parkour-infused District B-13 and Taken, whose European art-house-action sensibilities have found no more worthy successor than this.