‘Hanna’ seems to lack a bit of identity
An independent action film seems to be a contradiction in terms,
but that is exactly what
”
Hanna
”
tries to be and it may be part of the reason the film falls
short.
Hanna is a girl in her mid-teens who lacks an identity. She is
played by Saoirse Ronan, a young actress who was taken on
complicated roles in
”
Atonement
”
and
”
The Lovely Bones,
”
the first of which earned her an Academy Award nomination. She
was well-equipped to take on the challenges of the role in
”
Hanna,
”
which call for emotional and physical dexterity.
‘Hanna’ seems to lack a bit of identity
An independent action film seems to be a contradiction in terms, but that is exactly what “Hanna” tries to be and it may be part of the reason the film falls short.
Hanna is a girl in her mid-teens who lacks an identity. She is played by Saoirse Ronan, a young actress who was taken on complicated roles in “Atonement” and “The Lovely Bones,” the first of which earned her an Academy Award nomination. She was well-equipped to take on the challenges of the role in “Hanna,” which call for emotional and physical dexterity.
But unfortunately, the story doesn’t always come through. Hanna lives in a remote, snow-filled plain with her father Erik (Eric Bana.) They have some kind of accent that is hard to identify and it’s clear early on that Hanna has lived in this remote location all her life. She speaks many different languages. She can hunt, skin and butcher a wild animal on her own. But she has never heard music.
The plot of the story starts to fall apart pretty early on. Hanna has apparently been training for something and when she is ready, Erik pulls out some type of gadget that apparently alerts authorities of where the pair is. He leaves their house in the woods and tells Hanna that she must “kill her or she will kill you.” The “her” he refers to is Marissa (Cate Blanchett,) a CIA agent who has the young girl on a death list.
CIA agents track down Hanna, but not until Erik has headed off on his own with plans to meet Hanna in Berlin when the girl successfully defeats Marissa. Hanna is taken in by snipers – but not before she kills a few of them – and they are shocked to find a girl all on her own. Marissa wants to interrogate her, but she must have some sense that the girl is dangerous since she sends in a surrogate, dressed like her in a red wig.
Hanna quickly kills the woman, believing she has murdered her enemy and she escapes from a high-tech holding facility in Morocco. From there, she makes her way to Berlin in quite a capable fashion for a young girl with no money, no clothes and no resources. At this point, we know little about why Marissa wants Hanna dead except that her father Erik was a CIA informant who went rouge and her mother Johanna was also somehow involved with the CIA.
The movie takes itself too seriously, with only the humor from a traveling family that takes Hanna in for comic relief. Sophie (Jessica Barden) is amusing as a teen who doesn’t really want to be traveling in a camper with her family and who takes an interest in her weird, new friend.
Quickly, however, the movie devolves into a series of chases – mostly on foot since Hanna can’t drive – scored to a soundtrack by the Chemical Brothers. The heavy techno beat goes well with the first scene of Hanna escaping from the facility with alarms and lights flashing, but by the end of the movie the techno was wearing on the nerves of some in the audience.
The first draft of the screenplay was written by Seth Lochhead in 2006, when he was in film school, according to a press kit on the film.
“Here is a teenager who has been raised in a forest and has gotten all her education from her father; she never met anyone else before,” said Saoirse Ronan, in a press release. “We meet her as she goes out on her own, and when she does she is fascinated by everyone and everything she comes across.”
Ronan is good at creating the sense of wonder a teen – who has never been out of the forest – would have at walking through the streets of a new city or visiting an amusement park. But there is not enough of that to make up for the lack of plot.
The movie had the feel of “Bourne Identity” or “Run Lola Run.” But unlike “Bourne,” which fills in viewers, it lacked a background story to explain why Hanna does what she does or why her father leaves her to attack a woman she’s never met on her own. And at the time “Run Lola Run” came out, it was such a fresh take on an action film with it’s retelling of the same story through different characters. Though the main character is a teenager girl, the scenes play out the same as in any action film.
At the end of ‘Hanna’, there is a little explanation, but it just leads to a lot more questions.
