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 (041511-original
pub date/091522-reformat date)
It was Jean-Luc Godard, I believe, who once made a statement to the effect that the best way to
properly critique a movie was to make another one. (These may sound like the
words of a pompous blowhard but bear in mind that in the years before he became
one of the world’s most provocative and controversial filmmakers, he himself
worked as a film critic.) I found myself reflecting upon that statement as I was
watching the new action thriller “Hanna” only a mere few hours after having
endured an extended trek through the cinematic wasteland known as “Sucker
Punch,” a name that I suspect now reverberates throughout the halls of Warner
Brothers with the same kind of fear and dread that the mention of the boogey man
once inspired in first-grade classrooms. Both films are outrageous and violent
fantasies centered on young girls (okay, the chief heroine in “Sucker Punch” was
briefly referenced as being 20 but she was dressed and made up to look much
younger and was known throughout only as Baby Doll) with seemingly superhuman
fighting and survival skills who single-handedly lay waste to countless
opponents while trying against all odds to achieve her chief objective and both
films are, no matter how you slice or parse things, inherently ridiculous from
start to finish. The difference is that while “Sucker Punch” was clearly willing
to sacrifice even the most tenuous bit of comic-book logic in order to provide
viewers with a non-stop sensation machine that was so coldly stylized that even
the geekiest audience members were left wishing for something a little more
substantial, “Hanna” pulls off the considerably trickier feat of telling a story
that takes itself relatively seriously while still recognizing its inherent
goofiness thanks to a combination of wild action set-pieces and surprisingly
deft contributions from a cast and crew that one would not normally associate
with a project of this sort. The results are nearly perfect. It successfully
combines artistic pretensions and giddy action thrills in ways that will remind
viewers favorably of similar genre mash-ups like “La Femme Nikita” and the Jason
Bourne films.
Our heroine is a 16-year-old girl named Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) and when we first
encounter her on the frozen lands of Finland, she gently regards a moose that
has come into her line of sight before coolly dispatching with an arrow, pausing
only to reflect that she just missed a direct hit to the heart. As we gradually
begin to learn, Hanna has been raised in this remote area since infancy by her
father (Eric Bana), an ex-CIA agent who went off the grid years ago in order to
avoid being hunted down and killed for what he knows about past missions and the
curious circumstances of Hanna's existence. Since then, he has been training her
around-the-clock to become the perfect killing machine in order to defend
herself against the enemies who are still out to get them.
Feeling ready at last to confront her enemies once and for all, specifically (Cate
Blanchett), a high-ranking agent who knows even more about Hanna than her father
and who will do anything to clean up those two particular loose ends in the
messiest manner possible, Hanna deliberately trips a signal that will lead them
to her while her father heads off on his own with the plan of the two of them
reuniting in Berlin when everything is finished. Hanna is brought in to an
underground facility where she calmly and unhesitatingly kills everybody in her
path while making her escape to the surface in what turns out to be the Moroccan
desert. With the occasionally unwitting help of Sophie (Jessica Arden) a spunky
British girl who is on holiday with her family (including Olivia Williams and
Jason Flemyng as the parents) and who may well be the first person her age that she has encountered in her life,
Hanna makes her way to Berlin with Marissa and her brutal goons in hot pursuit
and in between the occasional bloodbath, she begins to experience the mysteries
of a quiet, normal life that have been previously denied her, though woe to the
boy who unwittingly attempts to
sneak a kiss with potentially tragic results.
On the surface, "Hanna" sounds like another ridiculously conceived action
extravaganza of the kind usually directed by a flashy cinematic hotshot looking
to earn his filmmaking bones and therefore, it may come as a shock to some to
discover that it was actually directed by Joe Wright, the British director whose
previous efforts have included such Oscar bait as the Keira Knightley version of
"Pride and Prejudice" and "Atonement," in which he directed Ronan to a Best
Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. Oftentimes when a director known for
stately and serious dramas decides to muck about a bit in a less artistically
respectable genre like the action thriller, the results are often too
self-conscious for their own good--the strain of trying to do something a little
more frivolous tends to hang over the proceedings to such an oppressive degree
that any actual sense of fun or excitement tends to get smothered in the
process. Wright manages to deftly avoid these pitfalls throughout and while
"Hanna" may lack the weight and resonance of something like "Atonement," it is
by far the most entertaining work of his career. On the one hand, he got lucky
in the sense that the screenplay by Seth Lochead and David Farr is a hell of lot
more thoughtful and intelligent than the usual action junk in the way that it
takes care to make Hanna into a fully-developed character even though the same
cannot be said about her. In fact, some of the film's most touching and
hilarious moments come during her excursion with Sophie and her pleasantly daft
family when she finally gets to see what a normal family unit looks like and
gradually begins to recognize the enormity of what she has been robbed of by
both Marissa and her goons and her otherwise well-meaning father.
At the same time, Wright, who has previously shown a flair for big visual
set-pieces in his previous efforts (including the instantly famous extended tour
of the devastation of Dunkirk in "Atonement," a supposedly one-shot
tour-de-force that I believe is still going on), brings a keen eye and ingenuity
to his action scenes and they are among the most exciting to hit the screen in a
while with two of them--one in which Hanna is being chased throughout a shipyard
by various murderous goons and another apparently one-take extravaganza that
follows her father from the streets into an underground terminal that suddenly
fills up with bad guys needing to be taken down--likely to go down as instantly
classics among film buffs.
Under normal circumstances, the quality of the performances in action movies are
rarely discussed unless they happen to be egregiously awful because to most
observers, they are not nearly as important as the visceral thrills on display.
"Hanna," on the other hand, is that rare bird of an action film where the
performances are all surprisingly strong and effective and help deepen the
impact of the story. Already celebrated for her performances in such films as
"Atonement" and "The Lovely Bones" (where she was one of the only people who
escaped that disaster relatively unscathed), Saoirse Ronan turns in an
astonishing performance as Hanna and transforms what could have been a
one-dimensional caricature into a real and completely fleshed-out character
whose improbable plausibility helps ground the story in reality instead of
letting it spin off into another garish comic book along the lines of "Kick-Ass"
or "Sucker Punch."
Although I haven't been a huge fan of the majority of Eric Bana's past performances--after his
electrifying and fascinating turns in "Chopper" and "Hulk,"
he kind of turned into a slightly more expressive version of Gerard Butler--he
is strong and sure as well and Cate Blanchett is clearly having a blast as the
evil CIA spook torn between her admiration for Hanna and her abilities and her
desperate need to destroy her in order to save her own neck. There are also a
bunch of funny and interesting turns from the large supporting cast that come
across as special little treats to complement the main course--the scenes
involving the British family Hanna encounters, for example, are so funny and
charming that I found myself wishing of a "Get Him to the Greek"-style spin-off
that would focus entirely on them (only, you know, good).
I do have a couple of small problems with "Hanna" here and there--the stuff
involving her oddball biological origins is never adequately explained and while
the violence on display is never overly repugnant, I must admit that I was
surprised to discover afterwards that it somehow managed to get a PG-13 from the
always-on-the-ball folks at the MPAA. However, these are minor problems at best
and they are so thoroughly offset by all the things that do work ranging from
the performances and direction to the beautiful cinematography by Alwin Kuchler
and the trippy score from The Chemical Brothers that it hardly seems worth it to
dwell on them for too long. For the most part, "Hanna" is a thrilling, exciting
and strangely touching epic that is one of the few cinematic high point of the
year to date and one of the rare action movies that can be thoroughly enjoyed by
those who love that particular genre and those who loathe it in equal measure.
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