Hanna (Review)

Many will call Hanna aimless, and they’re not wrong. The entire film is one long chase scene with no real destination. It runs and runs and runs until it decides to stop running, at which point the end credits begin. It moves so quickly and with such grace that it’s almost impossible to dissect any of its flaws. It’s got so much sizzle you completely forget to ask for steak.

Saoirse Ronan plays the eponymous Hanna, who has grown up in the middle of nowhere with her father Erik Heller (Eric Bana). He has trained her to become both a killing machine and a multilingual genius. The only problem is that she doesn’t have much of a personality, nor is she very cultured. One day she begins a mission that leads to her being captured by the CIA, and after a few twists and turns she escapes into civilization. Thus begins a film full of running, shooting and punching, all handled with expert skill by director Joe Wright.

Very little of Hanna would work without the fantastic work of Ronan in the lead. Wright previously worked with her on Atonement, and some (not me) may know her from Peter Jackson’s much-derided The Lovely Bones. She does a great job of capturing her character’s confusion at each new development, as well as her ultimate anger at the lies that have been told to her throughout her entire life. She knows what she’s supposed to be doing, but she doesn’t know why. Eventually, she starts to ask questions.

Wright has never made a film quite like Hanna before, as he’s mostly stuck to period dramas like Pride and Prejudice and Atonement. Making a nonstop thriller with a pounding Chemical Brothers score certainly seems uncharacteristic, but the film plays like it was made by a man who could do this in his sleep. Even the quieter scenes in Hanna are filled with a tension that some horror movies can only dream of. As far as entertaining the audience goes, Wright gets just about everything – sorry about this – right.

One thing I appreciated about Hanna was that it refrained from over-explaining the situation to the audience. If you’ve been reading my reviews over the past couple weeks, you’ll know that I’m quite the ending Nazi. One of the main reasons I’ve disliked the way so many films have ended is that they all seem intent on tying up every possible loose end. Hanna ends before you ever really know anything, and when a film has the guts to do that it immediately wins me over. When the film concludes, you don’t know a great deal more than you did beforehand. You just know you’ve been taken on quite the ride.

A common complaint about Hanna may be that it’s far too empty-headed. Wright’s direction seems to suggest that he’s aiming for something higher than mere action movie, and he does a great job at creating the illusion of a larger meaning. The lone problem is that when the audience starts digging for one, they’re likely to come up empty. To that complaint, allow me to use the lamest of defenses: I don’t care. Hanna’s too thrilling a movie to let something like lack of subtext get in the way of my enjoyment.

So far this year, mainstream film has been a whole lot of mediocre with very little great and very little awful. (Allow me to remind you many of the year’s most critically adored films such as Uncle Boonmee and Certified Copy have yet to reach me here in Ohio.) When I come across a movie as extraordinarily-made as Hanna in a year like this, it really does stand out. It’s certainly no masterpiece, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s popcorn entertainment at its most inventive.

Rating:  (out of 4)