Hanna

Forget the trouble you think you might have with a teenage daughter who smokes, drinks, swears and gets contraception from her friends in the playground then doesn't use it anyway.

Teenage girls can be quite a handful and Hanna is way more trouble than any other daughter could be because when she throws punches – people die. She's a ruthlessly trained assassin by her secret agent dad and with a blonde disguise over her ginger genes, she easily passes for a modern day example of the Hitler Youth.

Saoirse Ronan plays the lead role with a quiet intensity that echoes the character she played in Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones. But in Hanna she's not so much ethereal as she is lethal. Eric Bana plays her warm father who has the same concerns for his little girl as any dad – he wants her to be able to defend herself and survive in a world that's out to get her.

Cate Blanchett is a mother of sorts – mother to the subversive operation of destroying the father-daughter-killer-tag-team. But to me she looked like Julia Gillard on a ruthless rampage to restore order to a chaotic world surrounded by unreliably competent underlings.

The real success of this movie is director Joe Wright's ability to use every prop and every location in a highly provocative and meaningful way. Playgrounds are dangerous and decayed, snow is beautiful but unkind, daddies show they care by playing rough and demanding excellence and daughters murder then apologise for not doing it as well as they should have. The loss of childhood innocence would be tragic if it even existed in the first place.

Even the support cast and extras are homeless, baseless and nomadic like the leads. Everyone is on the move or on the run. But there is no escape.

I love wonderfully choreographed hand-to-hand combat action sequences and there are quite a few in Hanna – but I long for the day directors will return to holding wider shots so we can actually see the fighting take place. The constant rush of mid shots and close-ups with fast cutting detracts from a truly emotive fight sequence. Look at the footage of the beating of Rodney King – shot by an amateur – but you can't go past it for emotion. Hold a shot and you force the audience to watch. Every cut is a blink. And once the audience blinks – the emotional build-up is halted. Another great example of a terrifically shot fight sequence is in Coppola's The Godfather. Watch the unbridled fury in James Caan as Sonny as he gets increasingly carried away with bashing his brother-in-law. We get vital spatial awareness thanks to wide shots held long enough to turn us into gob-smacked witnesses. Now that's how you shoot a bashing sequence! Hanna has the menace of A Clockwork Orange and the inevitable pathos of Nikita while providing another example of what we are doing to destroy ourselves and our future. There are plenty of films about little girls whose circumstances and parenting options prevent them from being little girls for long – The Professional, Kick Ass and even Sucker Punch to some extent. But Hanna is the broken heart of modern youth from a broken family in a broken world that has cultivated a culture of making things that break then breaking them and throwing them all away like they didn't even matter in the first place.

Is Hanna a metaphor for raising a child in the post-modern world? What exactly do we need to teach our kids in terms of coping mechanisms and life skills? Is emotion now secondary to instinct and is that an insidiously smarter, more efficient way to live? We never really grow up. We just get bigger like the responsibilities heaped upon us. Our lives are terminally spent on swings and roundabouts in a spiralling state of disrepair so that playing games become less and less fun. And we all witness the mutilation of our childhood by the process of becoming older and so-called wiser.

If you haven't guessed it by now, Hanna isn't a cheery film. It's a grim fairytale.

Or maybe it's me. Chances are I've murdered my own childhood years ago. And what this movie has done is take me back there to identify the body.

It's worth seeing on the big screen.

Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Hanna (Saoirse Ronan), who was raised in a forest by her father Erik (Eric Bana). As an ex-CIA agent, Erik taught Hanna everything she needed: hunting, armed and unarmed combat, and all the languages in the world. One day, Hanna was sent out of the forest to assassinate Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), the woman who murdered her mother.

Joe Wright's latest feature is modern-day fairy-tale that is part revenge-flick, part coming- of-age drama. Like his last effort, 'The Soloist', 'Hanna' has some very good ideas that are let down by bad decisions and occasionally over-powering direction.

The film certainly has a very strong beginning. The concept of a killer child may be screwed- up, but this is offset by the curiosity it arouses. Why has Erik raised Hanna in this manner? Who is this woman they want to kill, and why did she become their enemy?

The storytelling is tight, intentionally drip-fed, which keeps the focus on the moment and makes the assassination plan more dramatic. Well, for the first 45 minutes. After that, Hanna sees the wider world for the first time and becomes distracted – which is both good and bad.

On one hand, it allows some insight into the effects of Hanna's blinkered upbringing. Having grown up killing her own breakfast and making her own fire, she is not prepared for her journey through the modern world. Seeing her flick light switches on and off in awe is one of several touching moments, which add a human side to what could have become another soulless gun movie.

However, Wright doesn't know when to pull back on the sentimentality. The film hits its low point when Hanna hitches a ride with a stuck-up English hippy family, which is meant to contrast the lonely, limited nature of Hanna's upbringing. Ironically, this family is even more dysfunctional than Hanna and Erik, and only succeeds in making Hanna's journey more irrelevant.

Her meticulous plan somehow becomes self-indulgent faux-art, featuring slow-motion Flamenco dancing. The film goes so off-course that it is questionable whether there was a plan in the first place. Is the story intentionally drip-fed, or is there just not very much to tell? For a child raised specifically to kill, Hanna doesn't end up doing very much.

That's not to say that there isn't any action. There are a handful of set pieces, and they are a delight to behold. From a fight in a subway to a chase through a labyrinthine cargo yard, the action is wonderfully shot and expertly edited. Long, tracking shots allow for a high level of clarity and immersion. Even this, however, is sometimes ruined with over-energetic camera-work, turning the film into a music video.

Saoirse Ronan is a good action star, throwing herself into her fight scenes with zeal, but her real strength is her acting. On one hand she seems so genuinely lethal that it's a little scary. At the same time, she has a delicate, innocent aura that makes it hard not to feel sorry for her. This is a layered performance that transcends the generic labelling of 'good' or 'evil'.

'Hanna' is not flawed, but sabotaged. Ronan is superb, and the action is fantastic, but even this is not enough to put the film back on course after Joe Wright steered it in the wrong direction. It started off as a good film, but ended up as a handful of good ideas, poorly strung together.

Joe Wright's 'Hanna' opens with a teenager (the title character) hunting a reindeer in a snowy forest. What soon follows is a carefully choreographed and skillfully shot battle sequence between Hanna and the person who, as revealed sooner, happens to be her father. Wright holds the viewer's interest right from the very beginning and takes us through a mesmerizing chase as Hanna continues to fight and run. Although the pacing is slow at times, suspense is well maintained. There is some humour which is cleverly incorporated.

The exotic locations are pleasing to look at and the Chemical Brothers's unique score is magic. The cinematography, especially the long shots, are outstanding. Examples include the scene where Erik is being followed by Marissa's agents. The shootout scenes are also exceptionally well done. I only thought that the upside-down shots were sometimes overdone.

The performances are topnotch. Saoirse Ronan shows tremendous potential and proves that she can lead a film. Cate Blanchett is terrific as the ruthless Marissa even though her accent sounds odd at times. Erik Bana is brilliant with his restrained performance.

A slick thriller with strong performances, an awesome soundtrack and great suspense, what's not to like about 'Hanna'?

Having read some of the more negative reviews on this site, all I can say is that they all seem to have the same complaint in common. Namely, non-acceptance of certain plot contrivances.

So let me say straight off: if you are the sort of person who didn't like Inception because it made no sense, or the sort of person who didn't like The Matrix Trilogy because it made no sense, or indeed the sort of person who didn't like any of David Lynch's films because (ahem) NONE OF THEM MAKE ANY SENSE...in short, if you are an incurable pedant, you will not enjoy this film and you might as well stop reading this review. Seriously, stop reading, don't watch the film and go calculate Pi or something.

If, however, you have an appreciation for tightly-edited, emotionally engaging, aesthetically pleasing cinema with a brilliant soundtrack and at times breathless pacing, please allow me to take a few minutes of your time.

Hanna is the story of a teenage girl who lives in total isolation with her father. She has vague memories of her mother, and these memories, combined with her (literally) encyclopedic knowledge fuel her desire to leave the relative safety of her father's protection in the frozen hinterland of northern Finland.

In a way, I don't want to say any more than that. If you've read the other reviews on this site that give away more, then I'm very sorry for you, but if not then suffice it to say that her father's motivation for keeping her in this state of isolation appears to be protection, combined with a desire to train her in survival/assassination skills, in preparation for...well that would be telling.

Of course, you don't need me to tell you that she leaves her father's protection and the story proper begins. As Chekov said "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no-one is thinking of using it" and boy, does that rifle get used.

Saoirse Ronan is brilliant as Hanna. At times seemingly invincible, at others pathetically vulnerable, owing to her complete inexperience of the world. We see the world from her unique perspective as she struggles to understand non-familiar interaction, the natural ease of recreation and even the basic electrical appliances that we all take for granted.

The story moves us from one location to the next, painting a rich tapestry of colour and culture, whilst simultaneously (and somewhat comically) contrasting Hanna's desperate need to traverse these territories with the bourgeoisie's seeming obsession with "experiencing" as many of them as possible.

The acting is solid throughout. The only truly great performance comes from Ronan, but Tom Hollander, Cate Blanchett and Eric Bana all turn out good performances that serve the picture well.

However the true credit for this film has to be laid at the feet of Joe Wright. None of his previous films could possibly prepare you for Hanna. Wright's mastery of both a tight, intricate plot such as in Atonement, combined with his incredible skill in making this beautiful, thoughtful, action-packed coming of age story mark him out as a director of real class.

It is true that Hanna suffers from a few plot holes, but that plot is delivered in such an appealing, exciting and above-all entertaining film that anyone who isn't compiling continuity errors for some god-awful TV programme that relishes in the fact that THIS ISN'T REAL LIFE, IT'S ACTUALLY ONLY A FILM!! should have a blast letting this film take them along for the ride.

If you want reality, watch a documentary. If you want a very good fiction, watch Hanna.

I really wanted to watch this film but I didn't have the time when it was in theatres. So I recently treated myself to the Blu Ray copy. I decided to check the user reviews before watching it and was very surprised by the amount of negative feedback. The reviews were almost hate posts! So, I put the disc in with mixed expectations and afterwards, I sat, glued to the credits thinking "what was their problem?!" Truly a beautiful film. Don't set out expecting an action packed bad-ass picture (I think that was the problem with most of the negative reviewers). Though not as frequent as your everyday action film, the action scenes are just as exciting as ever. If you liked the fighting techniques in Taken, imagine a teenage girl pulling off moves just as hardcore, if not more. The visuals and sounds of the film are nothing short of artistic. I give it an 8 out of ten. Not the best film of 2011, but definitely not the worst.