Film - Hanna (2011)

Shot through the heart, and she's to blame

A review on the DVD case touts the film as a ‘modern-day Leon’, but as Leon only came out in 1994, all that does is make me feel old. Besides, this film actually has very little in common with that particular exceptional Luc Besson film so it's a fairly lazy comparison. Here, the young girl isn't a slightly-annoying ward to  the titular funny-looking proficient killer - she is the titular funny-looking proficient killer. Apparently trying to be a globetrotting espionage thriller as well as a twisted modern fairy tale, the film seems to struggle somewhat with tone throughout, never quite sure whether it wants to be a modern Snow White/Red Riding Hood dark fairy tale mishmash or The Bourne Identity. In some ways this is effective and creates a curious, dreamlike surrealism, and as long as you get into the spirit of the film's persistent oddness, you can accept the jarring shifts in tone as the inevitable result of whatever strange fever-dream inspired the Red-Riding-Hood-meets-Jason-Bourne-meets-Nikita hybrid creature that the finished film ends up as. 

16 year-old German girl Hanna (Saiorse Ronan, Atonement, The Host) lives with her father Erik (Eric Bana, Star Trek, Hulk) - a former employee of the villain who couldn't go through with his grisly work: inspired by Snow White's Woodsman, perhaps? - in the desolate frozen wastes of Norway, isolated from all technology and communication that could give them away, where he teaches her survival, hunting and killing. The objective: for her to one day meet and kill Marissa Wiegler, the head of a rogue CIA operation into creating super soldiers, of which Hanna was the only survivor when Marissa had to violently dismantle and bury the operation, killing Hanna's mother in the process. Once the girl feels she is ready to find this woman, her father has entrusted her with a button; a button that when pressed will reveal their location to the CIA, and have Marissa and her people hurriedly bearing down upon them. It’s a very strange button. I’m not sure what analogue to fairy-taledom it’s supposed to be, if it is one at all, though like many of the important things in this movie it’s bright red so there’s probably some connection. How it doesn’t occur to the CIA that this huge, flashing ‘come and get me’ sign isn’t some kind of trap I don’t know. In any case, Erik goes into hiding, leaving Hanna to press the button, swiftly ensuring she is captured by Marissa's agents. Hanna is then interrogated by a double whom she mistakes for the real Marissa. Killing her, Hanna escapes into the Moroccan desert, believing herself to have accomplished her mission and unwittingly pursued by the real Marissa and her cronies, who hope that the young girl will lead them straight to her father, as she soon does, after some amusing detours with a holidaying English family. 

Only in the deserted icy tundra can one find refuge from PETA.

Ronan herself does a creditable German accent for the role, and brings some nuance into her performance as a young emotionally-stunted trained killer coming into conflict with her teenage hormones and the revelation that there is a world outside her frozen shack: a particular highlight is Hanna's bewildered confusion as objects as everyday to us as a ceiling fan, kettle and television set terrify the bejesus out of her. Her relationship with her 'adopted' family of tourists - the first people she's ever met who didn't treat her like a freak or an instrument - is almost sweet but realistically awkward, and her violent and almost lethal treatment of a boy who comes onto her at the behest of new friend Sophie is especially amusing and also very telling: most of the time Hanna or the others who inhabit her world display affection or emotion, they're using it to get their target to lower their guard before they strike. Even her father Erik can't be called 'nurturing': Hanna's childhood seems to have been as cold, remote and inhospitable as her surroundings, and her emotional awakening as the warmth and colour bleeds into her sterile and frigid life is what ultimately allows her to triumph over the ruthless practicality of Marissa and her goons.

Marissa's far-away gaze as she's driven around is obviously subtle
foreshadowing of how her obsession with Hanna leads to her
not minding her surroundings and her ultimate downfall...
okay, I'm overreaching.

Marissa herself (Cate Blanchett, The Lord of the Rings, Veronica Guerin) is an interesting character. Obsessively tidy and controlling - she flosses until her gums bleed - Marissa appears as the movie's 'modern fairytale' version of the Evil Queen and the Wicked Stepmother: having killed the young girl's true mother, she entices the young girl she seeks to destroy with feigned kindness while dispatching legions of minions to scour the world for the girl's hiding place. She seems to bear an almost maternal pride and affection for Hanna even as the girl evades her grasp and dispatches her men, and when Hanna determines to leave her life of violence behind and turns her back on her 'stepmother' during their final confrontation, Marissa loses her cool and unleashes a very telling "Don't you walk away from me, young lady!". There's another nice scene when Marissa visits Hanna's grandmother, and is clearly seething under her icy exterior as the older woman dismissively tells her: "You wouldn't understand; you're not a mother". Blanchett gives the requisite icy and manipulative performance, and very good it is too - and how nice for a film to have a competent female hero and villain - but for a woman with one of the most German-sounding names in the film, Marissa's accent is such that her voice coach can only have been Foghorn Leghorn.

The Official Handbook for CIA Interrogators has the following to say about
getting this close to potentially dangerous prisoners: Don't.

In a brilliantly tense and dynamic multi-camera set-up in an otherwise unremarkable grey room, Marissa safeguards herself for Hanna's interrogation by bringing out her body double: an unnamed agent with quite possibly the worst job in the world, played by Michelle Dockery (Hogfather, The Turn of the Screw) who makes an impression with a thickly laid-on Southern twang like the real Marissa's, with added insincere sickly sweetness. Needless to say, impersonating Hanna's primary target means that the character doesn't stick around for long. Obviously, we're supposed to be both excited and shocked by Hanna's lethality (and we are), and the film needs some way of making Hanna think she's achieved her goal, but... this scene raises so many questions. If Erik raised Hanna from birth to kill Marissa, why did he evidently describe her so vaguely that Hanna can mistake a woman of a totally different complexion, facial structure and age for the real thing? Do the CIA know that Hanna herself is dangerous? Why doesn't Marissa just talk to Hanna over videolink? Why would a rogue CIA controller who does all her work in secret be in enough public danger to employ doubles to get it in the neck for her? Why would anyone take such a job, given that dying thanklessly is basically a requirement? If this woman isn't normally asked to fulfil this role, why did she agree to something that must have looked and sounded like the certain death it is? Why doesn't Hanna notice that the woman's hair comes off when she kills her? Strap yourself in and roll over the logical potholes fast enough though, and it's a neat little scene - a clever reversal of instances like the Joker's interrogation in The Dark Knight - as for once we find ourselves wondering what horrors the captured, harmless-seeming hero is going to visit on our naively unsuspecting villains.

Fact: Good guys in movies do not burn things
like this. Ever.

Which isn't to say that the film's villains come off like a bunch of incompetent putzes (not yet, anyway). The director employs a curious effect whereby we hear Marissa talking into her double’s ear, and the double then parroting her lines back to Hanna, as the two women’s voices overlap and blur into one until Marissa’s voice seems to be coming out of the double’s mouth. It’s an otherworldly and slightly creepy effect – and good thing too, because it's the last time anyone working for the CIA gets to be threatening in the presence of Hanna. Some quick editing, dizzying camerawork and scratchy music later, the fake Marissa is sprawled over a table with a snapped neck, the intervening guards are wearing matching bullet holes and the deadly teenager is escaping into the Moroccan desert with the old 'cling to the bottom of an SUV parked on a manhole' ploy. Marissa and her now-diminished agents are perfectly capable of locating, interrogating and then liquidating any hapless bystanders Hanna happens to interact with for more than four seconds, but when it comes to actually dealing with the girl herself none of the CIA characters display a lick of competence or threat, instead having to outsource their villainy to Tom Hollander’s short, psychopathic, camp, lisping German Autobahn reject, who promptly steals the rest of the movie.

Polishing off the - unusually strong for an action movie - female cast are the stalwart Olivia Williams (Case Sensitive, The Postman) as the bohemian wife and mother of the holidaying English family Hanna joins up with, who gets a few amusing lines, and newcomer Sophie Barden, her teenage daughter who strikes up an unlikely friendship with the odd, pale German girl she bumps into in the Moroccan desert. Both are good - in fact, everyone is good in this film, curious accents not withstanding - but the character focus remains resolutely on Hanna and Marissa, and once the family have served their function in the plot they are dropped so swiftly it's like the writer forgot they existed - perhaps it's for the best: whenever someone who's interacted with Hanna in some way is interviewed by Marissa's rogue CIA operation, they have a tendency to turn up face down in rivers.

Leading the somewhat outnumbered male cast is Eric Bana as Hanna's father Erik, a stone cold German CIA operative who developed a fondness for the subjects of Marissa's experiments - in true fairy tale tradition, he isn't even actually Hanna's father (do any young girls in fairy tales have real parents?), just a guardian who raises Hanna to do what he cannot. Nonetheless, he is a sympathetic figure and, in a strange way typical of this unusual film, does want the best for his adoptive daughter, and it's quite possible to feel sorry for both of them in Hanna's inevitable shouty rejection of him when she discovers the truth.

I just... I just really don't know.

Tom Hollander (Pirates of the Caribbean, In the Loop) is actually very good in the monumentally strange role of Isaacs, completely unlike any other role he's ever played. Reminiscent of The Big Lebowski's seemingly plot-irrelevant punky nihilist German Kraftwerk imitators, even in a film with the guts to be this endearingly strange he almost seems like he's been teleported in from a completely different film altogether. Nonchalantly ambling everywhere in a Eurotrash tracksuit, whistling a curious piece of music that somehow manages to be diegetic and non-diegetic at the same time, he seems like the kind of colourfully unpleasant lunatic you might expect to find in a Coen Brothers or Tarantino film. Not only is he utterly bizarre, he's the most effectively creepy and competent villain the movie has going for it, Marissa choosing to leave most of the actual doing to her cronies, and the film could probably have done with a bit more of him.

All the music, in fact, is quite interesting. Composed by the Chemical Brothers, the soundtrack is an odd blend of techno music and electronic sound that sometimes blurs the line between what's background music and what's within-movie sound effects. It contributes strongly to the strange dreamlike atmosphere most of the movie is suspended in, and if the film's creators weren't smoking illicit substances for most of production, they've certainly done good impressions of people who were.

Symbolism Overload: is she the Big Bad Wolf, the Wicked Witch,
or the Evil Stepmother?

Rounding out the main cast is Jason Flemyng (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Kick-Ass), who gets little to do other than act the typical easygoing-but-protective father schtick and demonstrate his mastery of the spit-take in an amusing scene where his wife asks Hanna what her mother died of, and receives the blunt response "Three bullets". One gets the sense that Wright has a cadre of actors he prefers to work with and wanted to find a part for some of them in his new films: Olivia Williams and Michelle Dockery both returned for his 2012 Anna Karenina; Tom Hollander appears as the singularly oily Mr Collins in 2005's Pride and Prejudice; Saiorse Ronan made her debut in Wright's 2007 film Atonement; and Keira Knightley's title role in Anna Karenina racks up an impressive three leading roles for the director.

Eric, playing the imaginatively-named Erik. Another one of the
many actors not using their own accent in this film.

Joe Wright's direction is pretty neat too: there are a multitude of shots and symbols in this film that are impressive from both an artistic and technical viewpoint, the crowner of which is probably the scene in which Erik descends into a subway, is surrounded by CIA agents, and promptly demolishes them in hand-to-hand combat, all done in one continuous, elegant tracking shot that follows him into the subway and back out again, weaving in and out of pillars as it revolves around the tightly choreographed but effortlessly executed fight in between. The film is tremendously fond of the colour grey, as well as pale pastel shades which are often associated with Hanna - fitting, given her frosty and lifeless upbringing, and the still patience of a killer - whereas bright colours - Marissa and her double's fiery hair, Isaacs' tracksuits, the Grimm house, the Big Red Button - are alluring and active, but dangerous.

Other impressive shots and sets include the final showdown in an abandoned fairground (so, Marissa is a Scooby Doo villain as well?) as Blanchett stands in the jaws of an enormous wolf's head decoration; the aforementioned multi-camera, multi-angle interrogation scene which manages to make a featureless, circular matte grey room interesting; and Hanna peeking through a window to see a distorted view of Marissa's large, roving eye staring searchingly back at her. There's also a very nice chase through a shipping yard filled with huge, colourful containers like enormous Lego pieces. Sadly, I will now have to take off half a point from the final score for the line: "Grimm's house? As in, the Brothers Grimm?”. Symbolism, even obvious symbolism, is fine in movies, but if you’re going to punch me in the face with it you could at least do me the courtesy of expecting me to notice without help. 

Although the tone lurches about unsteadily like the sad limping wreck that is every named character who isn't dead or missing by the end, and certain twists and turns of the plot don't stand up to prolonged scrutiny, Hanna is overall a stunning visual treat filled with colour, arty shots, larger-than-life performances and German fairy tale iconography: a memorable and imaginative success only held back from an unreserved recommendation by its occasionally heavy-handed imagery and the pervading aura of oddness that may not be every viewer's cup of tea, even if it is mine.

7.5/10 - I just missed four stars