REVIEW: Hanna

A stag trundles through a barren wooded landscape.  Flitting from tree to tree, a small blond figure with a bow stalks behind it for a few moments before firing and killing it with one shot.  So begins Hanna, a movie about a young girl (Saoirse Ronan) who has been trained for years in isolation by her father (Erik Bana) to be a skilled and efficient assassin-- all so that she can kill Marissa (Cate Blanchett), the leader of a defunct secret government agency.  For those of you who saw last year's superhero spoof Kick-Ass, Hanna is for all intents and purposes Hit Girl: The Movie.  There are plenty of ways this film could have made its premise unique and interesting.  However, thanks to a threadbare driving narrative, inconsistent characters, and occasionally lazy camerawork,  Hanna is an unremarkable action adventure that chokes on genre cliches.

So what do I mean by non-existent plot? Well, around ten minutes into the movie Hanna's father produces a transceiver that, when turned on, will alert their enemies as to their location-- supposedly in the hopes that Hanna will be taken into custody and given an opportunity to kill their unsuspecting target.  This is precisely what happens, except that Hanna kills a decoy, and thus spends most of the movie on the run, thinking her mission has been completed.  The problem is, the audience isn't given any reason why Marissa needs to die, or what the point of Hanna's whole mission was to begin with.  A few details are filled in toward the end of the movie, but these only raise more questions; the film's abrupt ending lacks closure and significance because of this lack of emotional investment.

While Hanna is on the run in Europe, she tags along with a vacationing family, befriending the teenage daughter Sophie (Jessica Barden).  This family is meant to show what sort of relationships Hanna has missed out on living isolated in the wilderness, but they come off as either dense or (in Sophie's case) shallow and vapid.  Other than that, the actors do a fairly decent job of working with the script they were given.  Ronan has a good deal of screen presence for her age.  Tom Hollander's portrayal of the preened and sweatsuit-wearing hitman Isaacs is genuinely creepy and makes for the only interesting villain the film has to offer.

But at least the movie will have some good action, right? Well, sort of.  What fight scenes there are are well choreographed, but they're few and far between.  The movie relies much more on other action movie mainstays than anything else: the sterile "boardroom of evil" exposition scene, characters that are introduced and killed in the same scene, the government agent calling in a favor to an old friend, the ridiculously-conspicuous-henchman-follows-the-hero scene, and the hero's uncanny ability to ignore the negative consequences of having a bullet lodged in her gut... to name a few.

Hanna struggles to find its driving theme or identity.  There's not enough action to make it a popcorn-flick, and the complete lack of character growth ensures that it can't be considered a character piece either.  Save your money for now: there are plenty of promising summer blockbusters on the horizon.