Here's another teenage girl with problems but unlike Fish Tank's Mia the problems are slightly more fantastical than winning a dance competition or falling in love with her mother's boyfriend.
Saoirse Ronan plays assassin Hanna, a ghostly-looking teenage girl, who we first meet killing a moose in the snowy wastes. Eric Bana plays her father Erik Heller, a rogue CIA agent on the most-wanted list since losing his German wife Johanna.
Cate Blanchett plays the villain Marissa Wiegler, an over-the-top CIA agent obsessed with oral hygiene, in a similar vein to her turn as an OTT KGB agent in the last Indiana Jones film. She wants Hanna and her dad terminated with extreme prejudice, as these assassin types always say. Tom Hollander puts in an hilariously camp turn as the sadistic Isaacs, a German nightclub owner with bleached blonde-hair and euro trash clothes, flanked by two skinheads with bomber jackets and DMs.
Is this film a fairy story dressed up as a spy thriller or a spy thriller in the style of a fairy tale? The film’s beginning is straight out of the Brothers Grimm with a fairy-tale cottage in the forest where a huntsman and his daughter live undisturbed by the outside world. Or they did until they turn on the GPS tracker so Cate Blanchett can begin hunting them down.
Like the average Bond film the action travels about a fair bit from Arctic Finland to Morocco to Germany though no Bond film I ever saw had 007 hiding out in a VW camper van with a family of Bowie-singing hippies. (Perhaps Daniel Craig should give it a go in the next one...) There's even time for some half-baked exposition about altered DNA and super assassins along the way too.
If it sounds like the proverbial curate’s egg in many ways it is but remarkably the film works which is in no small way due to Joe Wright's solid confident direction. The Chemical Brothers provide a throbbing kinetic soundtrack and the actors manage to keep straight faces throughout.
Although Hanna has a plot that strains at credibility it is a film that looks great and has style in abundance as befits the director of Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Atonement. (Like both those films it features a bravura Steadicam sequence filmed in one take - here Eric Bana enters a Berlin subway station followed closely by a few of Marissa's agents.)
It’s no classic certainly but this brilliant slice of nonsense is worth two hours of anyone’s time.
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