Supersoldiers! What would screenwriters of action blockbusters do without ’em? The tireless, top-secret efforts of movie scientists across the decades to design a new race of obedient, indestructible supersoldiers, whether through genetic manipulation, selective breeding, cyborg implants, brainwashing, exposure to concentrated doses of radiation, corpse reanimation, or some combination of all three, have provided a convenient backstory for everything from Universal Soldier to The X-Files to Solder to The Hulk to Firefly and Serenity to… well, the only other example I can think of right now is Ultraviolet with Milla Jovovich, but I’m sure there are plenty more. And with Hanna, the subgenre enters its YA-ification phase with a story centred around a 16-year-old girl (Saoirse Ronan)—the product, we eventually find out, of an abandoned CIA supersoldier program—who has been raised in total isolation in a cabin in a remote Finnish forest by her ex-secret agent father (Eric Bana), honing her survival skills, her fighting instincts, and her aptitude for languages, explaining the outside world to her with selective readings from a set of World Book encyclopedias, all with the aim, it would appear, of preparing her for the not-too-distant day when bad guys will inevitably show up wanting to kill her.
Chief among those bad guys: Cate Blanchett, her hair dyed to its ultimate shade of redness and speaking her lines in a honeyed Texan drawl (an accent chosen, I’m assuming, to sound as smarmy and untrustworthy as possible); and Tom Hollander, a British character actor best known for playing mousy, ineffectual middlemen in films like Gosford Park and In the Loop, but who here reinvents himself as a blond German sadist who stalks his prey in blindingly clean white tennis shorts, sneakers, and tube socks.
I’m not quite sure Hanna hangs together as a cohesive story; it’s more like a well-chosen collection of cool visuals and moviemaking elements—an unusual score by The Chemical Brothers, some deglamourized but still stylishly photographed European settings, Saoirse Ronan with her hair and eyebrows dyed pale blonde, a fight scene shot in a complicatedly choreographed single take. I was particularly taken by an early sequence in which Ronan escapes from the underground compound where the CIA is holding her prisoner (it turns out to be somewhere in Morocco)—once Ronan breaks out of her cell, she makes her way instinctively through various monochromatic tunnels and ducts and chutes and admittance-restricted doorways that are shot to look increasingly abstract, as if she’s running through a series of ECM album covers. Director Joe Wright pulls off a similar trick later in the movie too, when he has Hollander and a couple of his skinhead henchmen chase Ronan through a yard full of shipping containers.
But there’s a staid, strangely mechanical quality to Wright’s direction of Hanna that ultimately left me a little indifferent to it. He seems to realize that this kind of movie needs a dose of “style” and so he’ll include that single-take fight scene with Eric Bana, but like his elaborate single-take Dunkirk Beach scene from Atonement, it somehow fails to be as exhilarating as he wants it to be. Like his countryman Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech), Wright is an intelligent, thoughtful, sober-minded director, a careful planner with an ability to draw solid performances out of his prestigious cast members, but he lacks the mad, bravura daring, the willingness to be a little bit vulgar and tasteless, and that delicious touch of perversity and mischief that you find in the work of the great action directors.
I kept feeling throughout Hanna that all the elements were in place to make a terrific, memorable, half-crazy pop blockbuster, but I could feel Wright shrinking cautiously away each time the situation promised to go in a wilder, more emotional or melodramatic direction. Imagine what an exquisite sonic banquet someone like John Woo would make of the scenes where Ronan hears music for the very first time… or what sly, satirical fun Paul Verhoeven could have with the scenes between Ronan and the gum-snapping, boy-crazy teenage girl she befriends while she’s on the run from the CIA—two girls with complete but vastly different areas of expertise.
As my colleague Josef Braun noted in his review of the film, it’s definitely a point in Wright’s favour that at least he avoids presenting Ronan (and the violence she metes out) as something for us to be titillated by, the way Matthew Vaughn presented Chloe Moretz in Kick-Ass. It doesn’t feel like a sadistic movie. On the other hand, why make a movie about a half-feral 16-year-old superassassin at all unless you’re going to acknowledge in some way that you think there’s something awesome about the idea of someone who looks like Saoirse Ronan being able to kick the ass of a trained male spy who’s twice her size? I guess I mostly enjoyed Hanna, but couldn’t help but wonder if all I was watching was a movie designed for people too embarrassed to ask for a ticket to Sucker Punch.
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