(4/2011) Hanna: Movie Review

This 111-minute, PG-l3 Rated Action/Adventure/Thriller starts out very quietly in the winter snows just south of the Artic Circle in Finland. A father is raising his teenage daughter to track, hunt and survive against any possible danger. They live in a Hansel and Gretel looking house deep in the forest. The daughter has been raised on the Brothers Gimm Fairy Tales. She reads the lavishly illustrated stories each night before bedtime. The Brothers Grimm is an important plot thread for this modern day story. In fact, the entire movie has a German fairy tale surrealism flavor to it.

Sixteen-year-old Hanna is played very convincingly by Saoirse Ronan. She manages to get all the way through this movie, which includes scenes in Morocco, Spain, Finland and various German locations without combing her long blonde hair so it doesn’t keeping covering her penetrating blue eyes and freckles.

Hanna’s Ex-CIA agent father Erik is played by his namesake Eric Bana. He escaped with the baby girl when his car was ambushed and Hanna’s mother is killed by CIA executive Marissa played well and ruthlessly by Kate Blanchett. All three of these characters are cunning killing machines or at least killing-machines-in-training if you count pre-teen Hanna as untested on human prey.

There is an excellent supporting cast in this flick, but few of them garner much screen time. Mohamed Majd makes a very colorful Moroccan Hotel Owner. Jessica Barden plays Sophie who is Hanna’s one and only teenage friend. They meet in the Moroccan Desert where Sophie’s offbeat, very liberal, English family is touring in a camper. In fact Hanna’s travels from Morocco to Spain with the visiting English tourists provide some of the movie’s best humor. There are actually some very good laughs in this movie—most involving Hanna’s first experiences with dating. Her would-be dates are in mortal danger without knowing it.

Tom Hollander does a good job as Marissa’s perverted assassin henchman. Lots of this film takes place in very exotic locations such as Morocco and much later in an abandoned and decaying Brothers Grimm Amusement Park in Berlin. The cinematographer and art director provide the film with a strange, eerie surreal texture. Almost every scene in the Brothers Grimm Amusement Park cries out in a visual scream. The weird musical score provided by the Chemical Brothers adds sound to the visual screaming. The audience should remember to sit still for the end credits because there is a little joke about music midway through the scrolling credits.

This is definitely not a movie for children under thirteen. It includes a lot of violence starting with Hanna tracking, killing a deer and then disembroiling and skinning it. Most of the audience will feel sorry for the deer because it’s obviously really being killed. At least with all the nasty killer-types in the film, it’s only make-believe no matter how it looks on screen. There is also no drug use or filthy language in this particular motion picture–just lots of killing of bad guys and a few innocent victims who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The audience may be exhausted just from watching Hanna spend most of this film running  in order to escape one danger after another.



James R. Holland is a film editor, producer, and author–most recently of Adventure Photographer (A Bit of Boston Books/ 2009).  He reviews movies exclusively for Basil & Spice.  Visit James R. Holland’s Writer’s Page.

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