Film Review | Hanna

There’s an interesting thing about British directors who somehow manage to sneak into the Hollywood scene – they seem to understand the system better than their American counterparts.

Take Matthew Vaughn – aka Mr Claudia Schiffer – who graduated from producer to director with the Daniel Craig-starring Layer Cake, and who, after adapting Mark Millar’s hyper-violent comic book Kick-Ass, is now well placed in the Hollywood mainstream, as his X-Men: First Class has just been released to an unsurprisingly enthusiastic box office intake.

In comparison to its more lucrative US precursors, Kick-Ass was a ferocious runt: scant on CGI, it tells the tale of an inadequate teen who decides to become a superhero because hey, nobody’s done it yet, and unwittingly attracts the attention of the New York gangster elite.

Doing away with the sentimentality that’s usually layered on these stories, Kick-Ass instead welcomed its 18 rating with open arms and opted for blood and black humour instead of spandex and heart-warming ‘messages’.

And it worked.

Similarly, Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice – the Keira Knightley one, Atonement, Creation) attempts to strip the spy thriller down to its essentials with Hanna, the story of a teenage girl (Saoirse Ronan, reunited with Wright following Atonement) who is trained to be a ruthless killer by her father, ex-CIA man Erik Heller (Eric Bana), in the Finnish hinterlands (incidentally, both Hanna and Kick-Ass feature highly trained teenage killing machines).

But when Hanna finally decides that she’s ready to dispatch their intended target, intelligence operative Marissa Wiegler (a cold-blooded Cate Blanchett sporting a Hilary Clinton bob), things get out of hand as Hanna’s ‘abnormal’ past is gradually revealed. Hopping across the globe with deadly survival skills – but no social graces to speak of – Hanna is forced to come of age under highly dangerous circumstances.

From its haunting opening scene, which depicts Hanna killing and disemboweling a deer as the snow howls by, we know we’re in good hands, visually speaking. Wright goes to great lengths to make an essentially ludicrous story as special as can be – watch for bravura interludes throughout, particularly when Hanna hops into Morocco – while the story is simple enough to be enjoyed at its own merits.

The film bides its time for Hanna to fully spring into action in earnest and, because the build up establishes a great atmosphere, when the teen finally brings the pain, it’s all the more satisfying. Equally satisfying is Blanchett’s turn as the prodigal wicked witch of the piece – Wright declares in no subtle terms that he is making a modern fairy tale – who she plays with an intimidating gusto.

But despite his good intentions, Wright can’t seem to decide whether he’s making a thriller or a coming-of-age tale and, assuming he’s going for both, the end result is a bit unbalanced – even pretentious at times. Kick-Ass was unabashedly gleeful in its bloody, potty-mouthed naughtiness; here, Wright wants to get existential.

The sad thing is that while he succeeds in capturing the bleak desolation of the Finnish snowscape and a genuine, raw take on Morocco – complete with dreamy sequences of Hanna coming to terms with her plight – the fight scenes are rather rote, and the fairy tale imagery laid on a bit too thick to sustain the illusion in a convincing way.

I’m not saying that ambitious failures aren’t poignant… I’m just not sure whether they’re worth the cinema fee.