Hanna (2011)

Directed by Joe Wright
Written by Seth Lochhead and David Farr
Featuring Eric Bana, Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett

There are two things you’ll immediately notice about Hanna: 1) it feels like a tasteful, well-made, convincing, intriguing European action movie, and 2) Eric Bana is rifle hot.

Both screenwriters (Farr and Lochhead) and the director (Wright) have a dreary resume including various adaptations of Jane Austen novels and stuff starring Kiera Knightly in period costumes. Boring, really, and not the kind of background you’d expect from the creators of something as intense, engaging, and unique as Hanna, though Ronan appeared in Wright’s boring, forgettable Atonement as Girl Who Did Something, However No One Watched The Film. How did Wright end up making this gem? Perhaps he's been so bored for so long that all of his dry British BBC-like fell away in layers and revealed that what he really wants to do is excite an audience for once. He succeeds.

Sure, it’s a story you may have heard told before, sort of. Government genetic experiments and defecting C.I.A. agents who get revenge on corrupt government heads, etc. But Hanna is about 16-year-old Hanna and how she eludes evil C.I.A. operative Marissa Siegler and discovers how fucking good she is at killing people while she does it. Eric Bana is Erik Heller, a German-ish ex C.I.A. agent who now lives in the frozen wastelands of northern Finland with his 16-year-old daughter Hanna. They hunt rabbits, wear rabbit fur hats, and basically ignore the rest of the world. Heller has wanted to keep Hanna a secret long enough to train her for a deadly mission of revenge, and Hanna is ready to accept the mission. He shows Hanna a blinking light on a metal box, and once Hanna flips the switch, the C.I.A. will know her whereabouts and she will have to fight for her life. She will also have an opportunity to fulfill her mission, and her father’s, at long last.

Interwoven into the backdrop of action/spy thriller storyline is a sophisticated string of Grimm’s Fairy Tales mythology. Marissa Siegler (played by the awesome Blanchett) is the evil queen, Hanna is the young princess running for her life, and the various people she meets on her way hinder, or help her, as befits the heroine of such a fairy tale. But aside from the whimsical nature of Hanna’s imagination, the fairy tale comparisons stop there, because Hanna’s world, and real identity, is far more sinister than anything in a fairy tale. Hanna has been robbed of her childhood, and no amount of longing can make magic accessible to her.

There are some incredibly poignant scenes between Hanna and another teenage girl she befriends on her way running from Morocco to Germany; these scenes put into perspective how eerily lonely, sad, and different Hanna really is from other 16-year-old girls. They are also quite funny and real, something rare in an action film.

Ronan and Bana both have incredibly exciting fight sequences (Bana has one without any cuts at all) and Blanchett is both creepy and surprisingly sympathetic as a woman desperate to keep her illegal and morally questionable life’s work under control.

Hanna’s mantra, taught to her by her father before she embarks on her dangerous mission, is “Adapt or Die,” and it isn’t until the end of the movie that we find out that Hanna is indeed better at adapting than any of us ever will be, and that while her natural lack of pity and instinct for fear have made her an incredible fighter and survivor, they have also genuinely made her dangerous in ways that should never ever be introduced into humanity.

Did I happen to mention that this sophisticated, interesting, and subtle movie has an incredible score from The Chemical Brothers? It does. Riveting and unorthodox, Hanna makes regular American action movies look like the total dogshit that they really are. By the way, Eric Bana did 1000 sit-ups a day for about 6 months before they shot this thing, so when he takes his shirt off, look; let Bana know you care.

Rating: (4 out of 5):