Hanna ****

After the profound Atonement and whimsical Pride & Prejudice director Joe Wright demonstrates that not only can he bring his trademark subtle tones and emotion to an action film, but also inject humour and dramatic style. Hanna is the outcome, an intelligent action thriller with a pumping Chemical Brothers soundtrack, combining fairy tale with a strong European modernist, almost Bauhaus trait. As a coming-of-age road movie, Hanna, starring The Way Back’s Saoirse Ronan as Hanna, offers an intriguing journey, laced with unexpected bouts of humour that give it a quirky, eccentric edge.

Hanna starts out like many other action thriller out on the unforgiving land, for example Shooter, with a slightly convoluted, but necessary start to show the basic origins of our young heroine, Hanna (Ronan), and her development, both in mind and body. Hanna is raised in a remote environment by her ex-CIA operative and fugitive father, Erik (Eric Bana), to be the perfect assassin – and walking encyclopedia – and always to expect the unexpected, even when half asleep. As in the animal kingdom, when she’s ready, she must fly the nest by pressing a button to signal where father and daughter have both been hiding all these years. Her dangerous mission takes her across Europe to a designated meeting place in a disused amusement park in Berlin, where Erik will find her. Tracked by a ruthless intelligence agent, Marissa (Cate Blanchett), and her sinister henchman Isaacs (Tom Hollander), Hanna finally does what she’s been taught to do, and delivers her own kind of blunt justice.

Unlike Luc Besson’s stroppy ex-addict-cum-assassin Nikita, Hanna is refreshingly focused and resourceful for a teen killer, partly due to the exceptionally mature acting talents of Ronan in the lead, who gives the same attention to detail to her performance, as she does in The Way Back and in Wright’s Atonement. Much like her character, Ronan has developed into quite a force to be reckoned with, and proves such a strong and hypnotic lead that she almost outshines her older co-stars, Bana and Blanchett, in the process. She combines innocence and virtue with a deadlier mindset in a deadpan delivery, captivating us until the end as to the real reasons she’s so special and desirable to the authorities. Ronan also embraces the action sequences head on, and one escape sequence simultaneously shows Wright could make a decent pop-video film-maker for all its artistic cinematography, patterning and chic style.

Blanchett is no stranger to playing strong women, and again, delivers a faultless performance as complex character Marissa who’s like a dangerous chameleon of easy-going one moment and cold-blooded the next. There’s one point in the story where it’s suggested that she’s Hanna’s birth mother, and with Hanna‘s ever-present sci-fi connotations, this inference never quite disappears. Adding an unnerving edge to Marissa’s endless, bloody pursuit is Hollander in a camp psychotic performance that fizzes with dark humour, but that the accomplished actor keeps reasonably contained.

It’s Bana who gets to demonstrate his solid action-man credentials again in one of two awesome set pieces, with some The Matrix-style moves and accompanying camera angles. What the first – set in a Berlin subway – does is spark nostalgic survival moments of Bana in the excellent Munich, but also gives Wright an opportunity to adapt his infamous long and complex tracking shots into an action sequence of breathtaking proportions. The second is a beautifully choreographed chase across a container park that feeds into the architectural Bauhaus design of simplistic patterning and movement, as Hanna nearly comes close to capture.

In stark contrast is Hanna’s exploration of child-like innocence, with the character’s hilarious, almost clinical discovery of the opposite sex and teenage angst, after meeting a travelling Brit family and making her first friend (played by Jessica Barden of Tamara Drewe fame). Coupled with this is the film’s references to the good and bad aspects of fairy tales, including a stylised, if slightly (and unshamedly) over-egged scenario, where Marissa is portrayed as Hanna’s Big Bad Wolf who needs slaying. The end confrontation results in one of the most recent, chilling and memorable child deliveries, said by Ronan: “I just missed your heart”.

To describe Wright’s Hanna as ‘an action thriller’ actually does it little justice, as does the snappily-edited international trailer, in capturing its unique look and feel and scenarios. So, if you’re searching for something out of the ordinary from the genre with a distinctly eccentric European perspective, Hanna is a must-see cult film in the making.

4/5 stars

By @FilmGazer