HANNA

Director: Joe Wright 
Year: 2011
Screenwriters: Seth Lochhead and David Farr

Main Cast:

Saoirse Ronan – Hanna
Eric Bana – Erik
Cate Blanchett – Marissa
Tom Hollander – Isaacs
Olivia Williams – Rachel
Jason Flemyng – Sebastian
Jessica Barden - Sophie

Taking into consideration all my friends and potential future readers who can’t read Portuguese, I have decided to write some reviews in English. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of my friends, either close or distant, speaks and reads English fluently. So, I guess it’s ok. I hope I don’t come across as a pretentious idiot.

Hanna is a very strange film. I still don’t know whether I like it or not. Yes, it’s hugely influenced by one my favorite movie franchises - The Bourne flicks. The fight scenes and the whole thing about the American government funding programs to create the perfect assassin are quite exhilarating elements though not exactly fresh news.

The catch in this one is that the perfect and infallible soldier is a skinny twelve-year-old girl. She looks fittingly otherworldly, aloof, almost non-human. Her hair and eyebrows are blond to the point of being nearly white. She interested me as a character because of her fiery and passionate behavior. She can be sweet, tender, even loving to the people she cares about, especially her father and her newly-acquired best friend, Sophie, a rather typical type of teenage-female-chav girl from the UK. Even though they share the best, most touching scene in the movie, inside a camping tent, no doubt Sophie’s character doesn’t go much further than just being the comic relief. However, if you stand in her way, Hanna can break your neck as if it were a twig. Her mission in life is to revenge her murdered mother and kill her nemesis, Cate Blanchett.

Now, in order to thoroughly enjoy this movie, one has to resort to a lot of suspension of disbelief. Honestly, it was too much for me. The action scenes are well-crafted, the music is great – electronic, like the one in “Run Lola Run” – the editing is appropriately quick, but one really must make a huge effort to get into the film’s universe and believe that this little girl can throw an arrow not using a bow, but a piece of string or shoe laces or whatever it was and kill one of her foes.

Actually, this is a quite hard review to make because I don’t understand the point of this film, other than providing entertainment. I have to confess that I didn’t notice any underlying message. In a simplistic way, I could easily summarize the film: Saoirse and Cate chasing and, at the same time, running away from each other until they meet in the end and have their final confrontation. So what? There are a few surprising discoveries about Hanna’s origin throughout the movie, but nothing with real impact.

Hanna reminds me of another Bourne-type movie made recently: “Unknown”, starring Liam Neeson. This one also had a slightly different perspective on the subject: Middle-aged Bourne who is a good guy now because, after a car accident, only remembers the character he'd invented to crash into a party and kill a VIP. Upon watching that movie, I had the same feeling of disappointment. It was just a spin-off. I think it proves that, even if a film has the same interesting and effective elements of another successful movie, it can still be flop. A great film needs a soul, something that makes it unique, even the “action-packed” ones.

Grade: M

Link at imdb.