So I’ve been staying at home the past few weekends instead of plunking down dollars to see Scream: 4, When Two Shitty Sequels Just Aren’t Enough or Tyler Perry’s Jesus and Biscuits. However, I did manage to see this pretty-good, vaguely Euro art house thriller that isn’t so art house.
Hanna is about a young girl who has been trained by her former spy father (Eric Bana, who just barely missed stardom) to be a deadly teenage assassin in a fight for her own survival against a ruthless CIA executive (Cate Blanchett). Right from the start we can tell there’s something a little extra going on with Hanna (Saoirse Rowan) because of her extreme albino look and shocking strength for a girl that can’t weight more than a hundred pounds.
Soon enough we find out the answer—not really that compelling—and even though none of it is that memorable, it’s enjoyable enough during the pre-Summer dead period of mid-April.
What Works: Rowan is excellent as Hanna. She’s paradoxically ferocious and vulnerable, militarily skilled but socially inept, as scared as she is scary. You feel for this character every step of the way, even if you don’t particularly care much about the film around her. Also, Eric Bana is pretty solid and the Chemical Brothers score gives the film a great sense of mood, which is most solid during the beginning Scandinavian scenes and the end.
What Doesn’t Work: After the film leaves the surreal frozen caves in the beginning, it’s pretty standard thriller stuff (there’s even a “normal” family Hanna bonds with to show what’s lacking in her upbringing, yawn, and we’re never given much closure on that subplot) until the end. And Cate Blanchett’s villainess is pretty sorry. It’s all bad accent—Blanchett can’t do Southern, as other movies like The Gift have proven—and un-scary soccer mom haircut. It’s probably one of the worst performances I’ve seen this actress (who should have been a great choice for a sleek businesswoman villain) give, and it’s become more obvious Blanchett is willing to phone it in lately. And the actual conspiracy about why Hanna is special is so damn standard, even the movie seems bored with it, bringing it up towards the end and not talking about it for more than a scene.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Probably gone with a different Cate, Kate Winslet, who is starving for a good villainess role (she’d be great as a James Bond villain). Also found some more terrifying supporting villains, because the guys Blanchett’s character chooses to follow Hanna are lame, incompetent (they follow Hanna way too closely), and just generally do nothing scarier than wear tight white shorts with white slippers…I’m not kidding.
oh i have to check it out!