Hanna lives a secluded life out in an arctic wood with her overprotective father Erik. But that’s not the half of it. By secluded I mean that they live in a shanty cabin that looks to be very hand made, and there appears to be a small country between them and civilization. And by overprotective, I mean that Erik is constantly drilling the tenants of survival into Hanna’s head, ambushing her with attacks at all hours of the day, including when she’s asleep. They hunt, they spar, they practice languages, they read from textbooks; every second of Hanna’s day is spent molding her into something. And then the day comes when it is decided she is ready. Erik digs a tracker out of the ground, tells Hanna that she can push the button whenever she wants, but as soon as she does, an intelligence agent named Marissa Wiegler will hunt her down and never stop until one of them is dead. None of this makes any sense. Marissa Wiegler doesn’t seem to be actively looking for Hanna and Erik at all. They only come to her mind when the tracer starts going off, and some underling briefs her about it. Probably they could be living somewhere in the civilized world just fine. Nonetheless, the button is pushed, the hunt begins, and Hanna doesn’t let up for a second from its title card to the closing credits. The details of who these people are and why they’re doing what they’re doing never really get explained, and they likely wouldn’t make much sense if they did; but Hanna never asks you to wonder. This isn’t a film that’s about plot points and technicalities; it’s an experience, a thrill ride. Hanna focuses on character and excitement and style instead of spy movie cat and mouse intrigue. If you want to, you can dissect the plot, reveal its holes, and declare this movie a failure. But why would you want to do that when there’s so much good stuff here to enjoy?
The biggest thing that Hannah has going for it is just that it’s fun to watch. Director Joe Wright and cinematographer Alwin H. Kuchler create a kinetic, always changing, always impressive visual style that makes every second of Hanna’s journey pop with vibrancy and life. There isn’t much that separates this film’s makeup from that of a lot of other modern action films on the surface level, there’s quick cuts, a constantly wandering camera, pumping techno music; it’s the usual bag of tricks. But what sets Hanna apart is that its tricks are implemented with so much more skill than we get from most other action movies. This isn’t a mediocre director that is visually confused cutting quick and jerking his camera around to try and hide the fact that he doesn’t know how to construct an action scene. Hanna isn’t throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Here the style and approach is very crafted and very confident. Wright and company move their cameras around in interesting ways, but they also know when to let them sit still. They cut around a lot in the editing room, but they never lose the flow and perspective of the scene; instead they adeptly add a hurried pace and a tense urgency to every bit of action that we get. The music isn’t just mindless thumping, it’s memorable, catchy techno made by some of the best musicians working in the genre in The Chemical Brothers. The camera, the editing, the blocking, the music, it all comes together to create a stylish, hip presentation that I found to be pretty unparalleled when stacked up next to other recent films in the genre. Most everything that comes out these days tries to be hip; Hanna just is hip. It’s the difference between the cool kid on campus and the wannabe that everyone makes fun of behind their back. Don’t go see this movie if you don’t want to leave the theater bobbing your head to techno beats and throwing spin kicks at imaginary perpetrators on your way back to the car.
In addition to an overall cool presentation, there are also just a lot of little details that went into the making of Hanna that make it weirder and more interesting than pretty much any other killer spy movie that you’re going to see. The location scouting is number one. Anytime a big action sequence occurs in Hanna it takes place somewhere more visually interesting than you would get in most films. The attention to detail and the work put in sets the movie apart. The sets for the government complex that Hanna gets imprisoned in are stark and concrete like you would imagine an underground government complex being, but they’re also near expressionist in their interesting angles and uses of shadow and light. The big climax of the film takes place not just on a city street, like you would get in most films like this, but in a rusty, old, abandoned fairy tale theme park that is getting overgrown with lush, green forestry. It makes the climactic battle that much more memorable and cool, and it gives Hanna’s story a fairy tale subtext that colors your view of the characters. That the forest overtaking the rides and attractions is the dense, German forest that most old fairy tales are set in only adds to the ambiance. Hanna feels like someone who could exist alongside Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel, and that helps smooth over the fact that her story isn’t the most intricately plotted or well thought out. What we’re getting is less international espionage and more ginger bread house.
In addition to some chase sequences and gun play, there is also a lot of hand to hand fighting in this movie, and the fights are presented is one of the things that I ended up liking most about the film. While the fighting is over the top and unbelievable, pains are made to make it look as realistic as possible. Hanna and her father take out a lot of people. Sometimes they fight five or ten people at a time and they always come out on top. Their fighting never looks like a choreographed dance, though. It looks like someone who is highly skilled at fighting taking out the biggest amount of people they ever have on their best day. The choreography is intricate, but hits too hard and is too brutal to be dancelike. This isn’t martial arts showcase; it’s clawing, grasping, life or death combat. And the camera pulls back and actually lets you see what’s happening. We don’t fall into the trap of close-ups and quick cuts trying to make it look like a bunch of action is going on while the film cuts corners when it comes to real fight choreography and real stunt performance. There is one scene in particular that was breathtaking and had me pumping my fist in excitement. Erik is being followed by a group of shady men in suits. He leads them down an escalator and into an underground train station. The station is a vast, concrete canyon broken up by a maze of block pylons. One man in black pursues, Erik avoids around a corner, and then another appears from an opposite angle. The cat and mouse game continues for a few seconds until he finds himself in a clearing and completely surrounded by armed men who want to apprehend him. What follows is one of the coolest fight sequences I’ve seen in years. Erik dispatches every one of the agents in a brutal, hard hitting fashion. And the whole thing, from the first step onto the escalator to the final death, seems to have been filmed in one shot, one take. The planning and execution here just goes above and beyond what we’ve been getting in the action genre, and the excitement that Hanna is able to create is well worth the extra effort.
Aside from action and style, the other big thing that Hannah focuses on is character and performance. The biggest, most demanding role in the film is that of Hanna, and Saoirse Ronan steps up with my favorite performance in the film to fulfill the full potential of the character. Ronan comes off like some sort of albino angel. She is such a striking figure that every second she is on screen is engaging. Her charisma is so innate, her looks so unique, that your eye can’t help but be drawn to her face, and subsequently she doesn’t need to emote nearly as much as other actors to get across to an audience what her character is feeling. This allows her to work more subtly in emotion and give a more complex performance than you get in most spy thrillers. A big chunk of the film is watching Hanna experience the world and learn about herself for the first time ever, and it wouldn’t have worked as a whole without a really engaging lead to pull things off. Hanna is sort of a mix between The Bourne Identity and Dogtooth. That sounds like it could be potentially awesome, and it is, but it succeeds largely because Ronan is able to take you along for the ride and keep you engaged.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I didn’t much enjoy the character of Marissa Wiegler, and I felt like her inclusion as the film’s main antagonist was one of its few true weaknesses. I’m not really placing the blame at the feet of Cate Blanchett, as I feel like she thrust herself headlong into the character and brought her to life exactly how she must have appeared on the page and in the writers’ minds; but I found the construction of the character itself to be shallow. When we meet Hanna and Erik they are hunting in a stark, white tundra. Everything around them is washed out of color, blinding and cold. When they get back to their cabin, everything is conversely dark and warm. We get a big contrast between the hot glow of the fire and the inky blackness of shadows. When we meet Wiegler, she is in her apartment, which is also white, sterile, and cold. While Eric and Hanna live in an unforgiving environment, at night they seek refuge. Wiegler surrounds herself in the cold, and she does it by choice. Blanchett looks like a plastic, mannequin version of her normal self. Her teeth are unnaturally white, her hair shines like that of a doll, and we never see her in any state other than being perfectly quaffed. Blanchett affects a fake smile, showing off her creepy choppers whenever Wiegler is trying to be charming. She looks fierce in a Hillary Clinton-esque business suit whenever she need to intimidate. I can see that a lot of thought was put into showing off the robotic, inhuman nature of her character, but as well as that one note is hit, Blanchett’s character still remains, at the end of the day, one note. She reminded me a bit of Robert Patrick in T2, but the problem was that her character gets way too much screen time and dialogue to just be a relentless terminator. It got to the point that when the focus of the film would go back to her, I would get a little disappointed. A movie as dynamic and interesting as Hanna needed a much more dynamic and interesting villain than Marissa Wiegler.
But all was not lost. I got that interesting villain in a side character played by Tom Hollander. Isaacs is a perverted, effeminate gun for hire that Wiegler brings in to help hunt Hannah down. When we first meet him he is in some sort of seedy burlesque house choreographing a hermaphroditic strip show. The childlike circus theme that the genitally gifted performer strips to gets whistled by Isaacs throughout the rest of the film, and though it’s a trick we’ve seen before in things like Kill Bill and The Wire, it works just as well here. It adds a lot of ominous tension to the scenes where Isaacs is coming after Hanna, and I was whistling that tune for hours after leaving the theater. Where Wiegler is played as an inhuman blank page, Isaacs is all personality and affectation. The effeminate dandy being a cold blooded killer thing is starting to get overused enough to be borderline cliché, but Hollander pulls it off so much better than anyone else I’ve seen recently that he takes a fading old rag and restores it to something that feels fresh. With action scenes as fun as Hanna’s, I really wanted a fun villain for Hanna to go up against, and Hollander is able to help fill that void quite a bit.
In addition to these three performances, I think that Eric Bana and Jessica Barden deserve mention as well; Bana because his portrayal of Hanna’s father was one of the biggest roles of the film, and Barden because she nearly stole the movie out from under everybody else in a bit role. The role of Erik was more a physical one than anything else. We get a couple scenes where his father/daughter relationship to Hanna is explored, and Bana pulled off the emotion of the scenes well, but mostly what he had to do in this film was show up every once in a while and fight things. Bana looked good fighting things, especially in the aforementioned subway scene. I’d like to see him do some more action work in the future. Barden played the role of Sophie, the tween daughter of a British family of four that Hanna hitches a ride with. Barden is hilarious as a shallow, looks obsessed, self-centered caricature of Western youth. Hanna isn’t a comedy in many respects, but every time Barden shows up on screen laughs are to be had. And beyond that, Sophie doesn’t just get presented as a one-note joke. She starts off as a spoiled pain, but becomes complex and likable over the course of the film. Her budding friendship with the weird Hanna is one of the sweetest parts of the movie, and Barden knocks everything out of the park whether it be comedy or sincere moments. Plus, it was very refreshing to see a too-young girl over-sexualized on film for the purposes of comedy rather than titillation. Sophie and her quirky family add to the strange mix of small details that are more interesting than you would imagine getting from a globe hopping spy thriller, and that make Hanna stand out from the pack.
I’ve complained before about people who ask thoughtful film viewers to “turn their brain off” and enjoy crappy action movies. They ask you to just go with the flow and enjoy the superficial thrills of people running around and things exploding. To them I present Hanna, a film that has problems, but is competent enough that you actually can turn your brain off and enjoy it for what it is. The difference between this and action films that are true failures is the difference between content and execution. It’s not enough to just have people fighting on screen. The idea of that isn’t, in itself, inherently exciting; no matter how much the casual filmgoer wants to assure me that it is. A fistfight can be a very exciting thing to show on the big screen, but it needs a base level of competency to do so. It needs action that is dangerous and well constructed, not action that is fake looking and hard to follow. It needs to involve characters that you care about, not just martial artists who can do the most flips and punch the fastest. Hanna succeeds as an action film because it makes you care about its characters and it then puts them in dangerous situations. It gives you action sequences that are well planned and easy to follow because of proper camera placement and continuity obsessed sequential image storytelling. Hanna exceeds as an action film because it goes above a general level of competence and is able to present its action with a style and skill that other movies in this genre only aspire towards. Because of this, I would call Hanna one of the best action films I have seen in a long time. Even if the story doesn’t really make any sense. Just turn your brain off and enjoy it. And, if for nothing else, see it for the awesome Chemical Brothers soundtrack. It’s been thumping away in my mind for days now.
