Hanna: Movie Review

 
What up, Movie Lovers,

Well, I pulled out another movie that I bought months ago and finally watched it. This time the selection happened to be the film Hanna. Now I have to say that I only heard about this movie because the stars of the film were at the San Diego Comic Con a couple of years ago promoting its release in theaters. I didn't know much about its premise except that it centered around a young girl assassin.

Of course, the premise attracted my curiosity. I mean, why not? A young girl, long blonde hair, blue eyes, trained in weapons & hand-to-hand combat and special intelligence tactics! What more could I want?

Despite these intriguing details, which I didn't know about at the time, the film interested me. I caught the trailer for it several months after, but like every other movie I am only now watching it for the first time. Saoirse Ronan plays the title character Hanna, and Eric Bana takes the role of her father Eric Heller. The movie begins by establishing Hanna as a rogue nature hunter as she hunts, kills and gathers the meat of a wild buck. Her father confronts her and engages her in a series of offensive and defensive fighting techniques. As I watched it, the scene opened up the idea of remote training and survival skills, but the intention was not made clear yet.

During the next 15 minutes, the film continues to reinforce her father's training as Eric tests and attacks her with a series of different tactics. The only clue we get from all this is that her father has been preparing her for when she has to venture outside of the sanctity for their secluded shack in the woods of Finland. When Eric finally believes she is ready, the first plot is revealed that he was part of a covert CIA group. Certain other details are withheld, but an intelligence officer, Marissa Wiegler played by Cate Blanchett, is now pursuing them.

I'm going to skim though most details to move along forward with this brief review. Well, Hanna and her father part ways, and the film follows Hanna as she escapes from the underground CIA base, travels through most of Europe with the help a vacationing British family and ultimately confronts Wiegler. The interesting aspect of the film is how we're shown Hanna's immersion into modern society. She interacts with and is genuinely surprised by the foreign technology, scenery and experiences that she is encountering for the first time. Many of these moments are captured in Hanna's interaction with the vacationing family, especially with their daughter Sophie. The two bond and share brief moments of attraction and curiosity.

One of the complaints I had was the secret agenda surrounding Hanna. The reason her father trained her and why Marissa is after her are the same. Hanna is actually an experiment to create a super soldier with heightened speed, strength and intelligence making her an elite special forces agent. I just kept thinking that the idea was nothing new and over used. When it was revealed, it didn't have the impact that I thought the movie was aiming for. However, that minor point is, for the most part, irrelevant because Hanna's journey is what I found to be the most interesting part of the film.

The action during the movie is fast and gritty in some cases. You see Hanna take her bumps and bruises, but she also delivers the intense hits as she battles foes. Saoirse Ronan really puts on a performance and shines as she both explores her characters motives and fights with such precision that Saoirse could've fooled me with her expertise. I know its all about choreography but it really shows in how well she moves and the editing. She fun to look at. In addition to the visual display of action, the music, composed by the Chemical Brothers, also added a fast beat of electronica that helped to raise the tension and/or pace of many of the scenes. The score played during the scene where Hanna is fleeing from her pursuers in the shipping yard is my personal favorite. While electronic it also felt very playful and upbeat. The music in that scene mirrored the fact that Hanna was playing around against her enemies.

In recollection, Hanna was a fun action, spy, young girl assassin movie with a lot of spunk and clever storytelling. In a way, I would almost consider it a story that took the Mathilda character from Leon: The Professional and based it on her. So, I would say that it was time that I spent being well entertained.