Well, I had less strong antipathy for it than I did for Joe Wright and Saorsie Ronan’s first team-up Atonement? I absolutely, completely loathed Atonement, so that isn’t a particularly high bar there, but.
The problem with both movies is actually vaguely similar, though, and that problem is the script. Atonement was based on a book that I’m sure is of fine literary merit and all. But it was a story about shallow, hideous people doing shallow, hideous things and also doing ridiculous sentimental things and also doing ridiculous heinous things. Hanna, though, was about… flat people doing flat things. Atonement was well-written enough but loathsome. Hanna just, well, plot holes. Characters with no redeeming values whatsoever. Actually, no values whatsoever. Actually, no anything whatsoever.
The scenery was pretty. The soundtrack was quirky and industrial enough. The ass-kicking was impressive enough. But the plot was just thin. Saorsie Ronan’s Hanna and Eric Bana’s Erik are presumably daughter and father and live in a cabin in the snowy-ass woods of… Germany? So, okay, he’s training her to kick people’s asses. He’s isolating her from everything ever. (She does a lot of eyeswide-ing over things like music and electricity and friends.) She seems okay with this.
Whose asses? Well, presumably Cate Blanchett’s Marissa’s. Why? Because… she ran some exceptionally vague government program where they were making magical soldier babies or something? One of whom was Hanna? And Hanna’s mom is dead at Marissa’s hands? Except everyone thinks it’s Erik’s doing and there’s never really that denouement ever. Or any proper denouement. Erik’s got a magical FIND ME MARISSA box, and tells Hanna about it. She decides to press it, because…? Erik then runs off to Berlin, because…? Hanna then gets captured by… the CIA? Hanna then pulls a little girl lost to get un-captured and escapes. Hanna then makes friends with a silly British girl about her age, Jessica Barden’s Sophie, and her little brother, because…? Hanna then sneaks onto Sophie’s parents’ camper van, because she’s sneaky. Sophie’s mother is Olivia Williams, so yay, at least, for that.
After some more …? moments, and one funny moment where she’s out being skanky with Sophie and wearing a glittery tutu over her jeans and a sequined masquerade mask on her head (okay, that’s …?) and she asks the boy she’s with if they’re going to kiss now and then promptly informs him that kissing requires thirty-four muscles and wrestles him to the ground and seems to be about to choke him, Hanna finds out that Erik isn’t really her dad. He doesn’t really say why he rescued her from the superbaby factory and no-one else (you’d think he loved her mother, but he doesn’t say) and he doesn’t really say why they had to live in the woods. He doesn’t seem to register that she will react poorly to this and that, oh yeah, she can kick his ass.
Then some people get shot a bunch of times, then Hanna wanders around a different woods where the Grimm’s fairy tales house is and it’s a total tourist attraction and all dead amusement park-y. Then Marissa shows up, because…? Then Marissa tries to shoot Hanna, because…? Then Hanna shoots Marissa with an arrow, because…? Then she shoots her with a gun, too. The end.
It’s just unsatisfying. I don’t know what the point was. It would have been better if Hanna just shot a bunch of random people for no apparent reason, and they didn’t attempt to pretend like somewhere there might be a plot.
OH! But there were (gay Nazis?) working for Marissa, and they were amusing. Maybe not intentionally, but they were.
–your fangirl heroine.
