Dir. Joe Wright, USA/UK/Germany, 2011, 111 mins
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett, Eric Bana,
Review by Carol Allen
Visually and in all its technical aspects this film is a stunner. Beautiful and imaginative cinematography by Alwin Küchler, really skilful editing (Paul Tothill, who’s worked on all of Wright’s other movies) and a terrific soundtrack from the Chemical Brothers. But the fact that one is so conscious of the skills that went into the making of it indicates that there is something missing at the heart of it.
It’s not the fault of the actors though. Ronan plays Hanna, a 16 year old girl who’s been raised in isolation in the snowlands of Finland, where her father, ex CIA agent Erik (Bana) has trained her in all the skills of an assassin with her only book learning coming from an encyclopedia and a volume of fairy tales. We first meet her in a beautifully mounted opening sequence, hunting a deer in the snow with her father – an image which is to return again. After a brutal assassination forces Hanna out into the world, she finds herself pursued across Europe and into the Moroccan desert by ruthless intelligence agent Marissa (Blanchett), a former colleague of Erik’s, in a female game of cat and mouse featuring explosive, almost non stop action, which eventually leads Hanna to a disturbing revelation about who she really is.
Ronan does a very good job for an actress of any age, let alone one so young, in holding the centre of the film and Blanchett is impressive as her cold and elegant antagonist. She looks chillingly scary with her immaculate hair cut, perfect clothes and an interesting emphasis on the character’s obsessive love of good shoes and perfect teeth, though surprisingly for Blanchett her American deep South accent seems to come and go a bit. There’s a good supporting cast too. Olivia Williams, Jason Flemyng and Jessica Barden as the somewhat flaky yet likeable family who take Hanna under their wing for while;Tom Hollander having a bit of a ball as a blond and somewhat camp villain batting for Marissa’s team and Bana, solid and likeable as Hanna’s father.
The film as a whole however comes over as more than somewhat overblown for the story, which is, when it comes down to it, about the moral issue behind the reasons for Hanna’s unusual origins and upbringing. There is little or no time to reflect on the ethics of that and the effect of that revelation on Hanna. It’s almost as though the director, Joe Wright, was having such a great time playing with all the wonderful action toys he had at his disposal, that he buried the story under the weight of them and lost what it is about.
There is an attempt to make Hanna’s story analogous with the fairy tales of her childhood but it doesn’t really come over with any strength or clarity, despite the occasional references to Grimm’s fairy tales and the gingerbread house look of the chalet in the snow where she is raised, though if that is what you’re looking for, Blanchett’s character does admittedly have something about her of the Wicked Witch of the North clad in couturier green. This is though far more of a straightforward action thriller and it does at least scores points for having two such strong heroine/antagonist roles in such a film instead to two hairy blokes.
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