Review: Hanna

Grade: B-

Hanna is a sixteen year old girl, but she is far from ordinary. Since she was a baby, she has lived in the middle of nowhere with her father, Erik, an ex CIA agent, who has been training her to be an ultimate assassin her entire life. Due to this, she has superior strength, stamina and intelligence. It’s all been building up to one thing, a mission to kill the woman who killed her mother. When Hanna sends out an emergency signal, her dad goes on the run and the CIA come to pick her up. While being held in an underground facility, Hanna thinks she succeeds in her mission and makes a daring escape. While en route to the rendezvous point she set up with her father, Hanna encounters and befriends a family from England. The family begins to show Hanna many things that she has never encountered before; music, dancing, and general fun, all the while, Hanna begins to wonder if it was all worth it.

Hanna is an interesting take on the spy/assassin thriller. The first 20-30 minutes of the movie are fantastic. The first couple scenes that show her training and how she and her father live in the middle of the forest are very interesting. Then she goes on her mission and that scene and her subsequent escape are freaking awesome. But then the movie seems to come to a halt. What follows is and hour or so of her meeting a British family and becoming friends with the daughter, who you keep praying Hanna will throat punch at some point because she is very annoying. I understand what they were going for with these scenes as they were trying to show Hanna experiencing life as a teenager for the first time, but it grew tiresome at times. Also, the action scenes got weird after her escape as well. I find it odd that during her escape, she had no problem killing trained soldiers and CIA agents, but later in the movie she seems to have great difficulty even knocking a couple thugs to the ground. There are some points towards the end that are pretty interesting, but overall in my opinion, the movie never fully recovers after her escape.

Hanna stars Saoirse Ronan (The Lovely Bones, Atonement) in the titular role. While she was definitely better than she was in The Lovely Bones (but I still blame that on the writing and story) she wasn’t great in this movie. She had moments where she was really good, particularly with the actions scenes, but there were parts where she really fell flat, maybe that was the character, I’m not sure. Eric Bana (Star Trek, Troy) plays the role of Erik, Hanna’s father. Bana was really good in this movie, I just wish he was in it a little more. Cate Blanchett (Robin Hood, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) plays the role of Marissa, a CIA agent and Hanna’s intended target. I’m not the biggest fan of Blanchett’s but I did enjoy her in this movie. The movie also stars Olivia Williams, Jason Flemyng, Jessica Barden, Tom Hollander and more.

Hanna is a decent and somewhat interesting take on the spy/assassin thriller. I was hooked on the movie right away but unfortunately it lost me a long the way. It’s still worth a look, but I’m just saying it wasn’t great. Movies like this do amuse me. Once again, we have a movie with tons of violence (there is a scene with Hanna shooting people as blood splatters all over her face) but since there’s no language, it gets a PG-13 rating, I will never understand this backwards MPAA ratings system.

Great quote: “What does music feel like?”