Film Review: Hanna

[Warning: Review Contains Spoilers]

Hanna is one of those movies that you can't stop watching the first time you see it, but once it's done, you kind of don't need to ever see it again. For all its pulsing music and choreographed fight scenes (and twists in the story), the climax never quite lives up to the build-up, and the holes in the plot that feel incidental while we're caught in the film's thrall suddenly seem important after the word "HANNA" flashes across the screen for the last tim:. If Hanna's father is going to train her as an assassin, and tell her the violent way in which her mother died, wouldn't he go ahead and mention he's not actually her biological father? Is that really a bridge too far? And why did Cate Blanchett's character Marissa suddenly decide to scrap her super-soldier project and kill all the children she had biologically engineered? And why did Hanna and her father have to let Marissa know where they were in order to get the ball rolling in seeking revenge on her? Wouldn't it have been better to appear out of nowhere and surprise her? And why did Hanna's father look so pissed off in the flashback scene right before Marissa killed Hanna's mother? Basically, it felt like a lot of the movie got left on the cutting room floor, particularly in regards to Hanna's origins and Marissa's connection to her family.

Which is not to say that Saiorse Ronan doesn't do a great job portraying Hanna, or that Blanchett and Eric Bana don't also do good work in their supporting roles as Hanna's antagonist and her mentor, respectively. The problem is that Hanna is one of those sci-fi/spy thriller hybrids where none of the main characters express a lot of emotion, either because it's been trained out of them or, in Hanna's case, literally pulled out of them via their DNA, and thus after all the twists and turns and fight scenes are over, the film doesn't have a lot besides its beautiful cinematography to leave a lasting impression. Ironically, the most memorable characters in Hanna, a film about a young girl with super-human abilities, are the thoroughly normal family she meets up with on her way to Berlin, including a befuddled father (Jason Flemyng), hippie mother (Olivia Williams), and two slightly spoiled kids (Jessica Barden and Aldo Maland). They provide the only real spark of life in Hanna, and the only bit of warmth, as well.

Grade: B