Hanna Review

Saoirse Ronan, a stunning sixteen-year-old performer, anchors Joe Wright’s latest entry, “Hanna,” a marked diversion from his more intellectual “Atonement,” which also starred Ms. Ronan.  Her name, pronounced SEERsha, meaning “freedom” in the Irish language, is a fitting one for  Hanna, in that she races across the screen more times and perhaps  even more quickly than Franka Potente, the title character in Tom Tykwer’s “Run Lola Run.”  The blue-eyed beauty, well toned from months of preparation both in diet and in martial arts techniques to develop into a lass with almost superhuman strength, holds the screen as a model of female empowerment—if liberation has anything to do with the ability to knock small armies of men on their butts or dispatch a reindeer with bow and arrow in the frosty wilderness of Northern Finland. “Hanna” is pure movie, an incredibly strong action thriller which features heavy action making up grandly for a deficiency of both character development and clear motivation.   Both story and screenplay, written largely by Seth Lochhead when he was a twenty-four-year old film student, are transcribed onto the screen by Joe Wright, revving up his muscles after having contributed such delicate dramas on celluloid as “Pride and Prejudice” and “The Soloist.”  With energy pulsing almost throughout the picture, with a terrific soundtrack by the Chemical Brothers featuring songs and music from classical gypsy flamenco to contemporary techno, “Hanna” is favored by great supporting performances from Cate Blanchett, Tom Hollander, Olivia Williams, “Tamara Drewe”’s Jessica Barden, and especially by Eric Bana.  If you want to convince anyone that movies are not theater or literature, “Hanna” would not be a bad place to start.  The fight scenes come across as choreographed dance with considerable violence looking realistic, though some suffer from the usual dilemma of too-quick editing.  Saorise Ronan, born in New York but raised since early childhood and home-schooled in Ireland, performs in the title role as a home-school kid, lessons from her dad including memorizing the encyclopedia, gaining fluency in Arabic, Spanish, Iralian and English, and absorbing the wonders of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  Indeed production designer Sarah Greenwood ably converts a dilapidated German amusement park into a fairy-tale adventure-land, all the better for positioning Cate Blanchett’s Marissa as the Wicked Witch of the West.  Alwin Küchler films in the icy, thirty-three degrees below zero wilderness of Northern Finland, in the one hundred twenty-two degrees’ heat of southern Morocco, and in places between including Bavaria, Berlin, Hamburg, the UK.    “Hanna” opens with exuberant energy in Finland where Ronan’s character receives schooling in self-defense and geography but fails to develop a normal life with others of her age.  She is also the world’s only teenager who has never heard music.  It’s no wonder that she’s eager to leave her dad, marvelous teacher though he may be, to see what the outside world is like.  What she does see when she departs her cave  both enraptures (she is picked up by a traveling family and makes friends with her coeval Sophie [Jessica Barden] and fearful (she is chased by Marissa, as dedicated a U.S. CIA-operative as you’ll ever find).  What emerges is a view of Hanna that’s complex: she’s both a killing machine and a heroine, but we’re left with a gap in understanding the reasons that Marissa wants both her and her dad killed. We do learn, in time, why Hanna has been trained as an assassin, which seems logical enough, but why her dad, an ex-CIA operative is considered a threat to U.S. security and why his teen girl is deemed likewise dangerous is anybody’s guess.  During the film, a comical Tom Hollander exercising his métier as both an assassin himself and the operator in Hamburg’s Red Light district.  But forget about these other actors:  If you succeed in taking your eyes for a moment away from Ms. Ronan, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.