Movie Review: Hanna (2011)

Hanna (2011): Remember in Kick-Ass, when the little girl started shooting and slashing all the bad guys to death and calling them cunts? Oh, how we laughed. That's a bit shocking but it's mostly hilarious, we said. I'm LITERALLY laughing my arse off, rolling on the floor laughing. Well, Hanna takes that concept and applies it to a thriller chase movie, succeeding thanks to a few outstanding performances.

The film begins in Finland, where we see the titular Hanna (Saorise Ronan), a 16 year old girl, wounding a deer with an arrow before finishing it off without a second thought. We soon meet her father Erik (Eric Bana), who spends the first moments of this film looking homeless until he sorts himself out. Erik is training Hanna for something, constantly challenging her both physically and mentally, frequently going over a cover story should Hanna ever need it, because people would probably have one or two questions if you explained you lived in the snowy wilderness of Finland with a hairy man. References are also made to a mysterious woman (Cate Blanchett) who's going to kill her for a reason we're not initially privy to. When Hanna declares herself ready, the chase is on. The film's loaded with excellent action scenes where Hanna destroys nameless military goons with ease, plus the odd moment of comedy as Hanna fails to fit in with "normal" people having spent all of her life as a recluse.

The performances in this film are particularly strong and push the film from what could easily have been a slightly mindless movie into a very intense experience. Hanna herself is incredibly emotionless, like a robot programmed to survive, and that performance is an extension of Bana's, whose character combines the "emotionless assassin" with a fatherly twinge. One of the more bizarre performances is that of Tom Hollander, last seen on your television screens as a bumbling comical vicar on the BBC's Rev, who plays a murderous, whistling, bleach-blonde German henchman, a worthy second in command for any villain!

Hanna could easily have been B-movie fodder, perhaps starring the likes of Paul Walker. It could have been any chase movie, there's loads of them. Fortunately, the casting is tremendous and lifts things up to the next level and the movie never gets boring, it's always full of energy. Any slower sequences don't last an excessive amount of time and you always get the feeling that you're on the brink of things kicking off in a big way once again. Two thumbs up.