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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
HANNA Hanna is yet another dubious entry in the anime-inspired fantasy of waifish women beating down armies of killer men. It’s hard not to laugh when a scrawny 15 year old takes down trained CIA operatives during chop-chop Bourne Identity-style fight scenes. I don’t care if she’s a mutant super soldier. She had better have born on Krypton if we’re expected to swallow this. The premise isn’t bad. Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) has been raised in the remote Arctic wilderness (Finland, apparently) by her father, a rogue German ex-CIA operative (Eric Bana), and taught to become a ruthless, super-killing machine: expert at close combat, shooting, archery, and somehow mastering every language from Japanese to Arabic. The language learning is strange—and not just because the two Germans speak English to each other—but because the only books in their rude hovel are an encyclopedia and a copy of Grimm’s fairy tales Hanna hides under the bed. Regardless, living in the wilderness and learning secret agent skills are necessary because Hanna and her dad are being hunted by Marissa (Cate Blanchett), a steely Southern CIA chick who years earlier killed Hanna’s mom and now wants Hanna because of her ties to a shadowy government program (no spoilers, but take a guess). But she’s a teenager, after all. She can’t spend all her time gutting reindeer and reading an encyclopedia by candlelight. She wants to hear music! And see the world! So she convinces her dad to let her go off on her own. After a brief, bloody spell in the custody of the CIA (9-11 was 10 years ago—it’s OK for the military-CIA nexus to be bad again), she becomes involved with a traveling hippie family whose indulged, celebrity-obsessed daughter provides her with her first real companionship. (In contrast, Hanna’s dad, a tough-love sort, would attack her in her sleep to keep her on her toes.) But her surrogate family vacation isn’t to be a quiet one. As they trek across picturesque European and northern African locales, they’re pursued by Marissa and her gay German assassins (don’t ask). The absurdity is ramped up further by the questionable choice to film most action sequences as though they took place inside a Bronx warehouse party, with pulsing strobe effects and fast editing timed to the rhythms of the Chemical Brothers’ electronic dance soundtrack. At first, it’s different enough to be exciting—Hanna’s escape from a Moroccan underground base is especially good—but by the second or third time, it becomes a noisy bother. You find your mind wandering through each intrusively loud interlude.
The performances—the ones that count—are deft, and Blanchett and Bana
once again show they can handle tricky accents and silly scripts with
aplomb. Taste, or the lack thereof, is the real failing here. As I said,
the set up is amusing, and there’s initially a rather delightful feeling
of fairy tale simplicity—which the hidden copy of Grimm’s effectively
but not subtly suggests—but that is ruined by the screenwriters’
reluctance to hint at an idea when they can grab
you by the hair and shove your face in it. Why merely let the audience
recognize that you wrote a modern-day fairy tale when you can have the
movie’s climax take place at a Brothers Grimm theme park and have the
villainess actually emerge from the mouth of a big plastic wolf?
Brendon Nafziger
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