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.

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'?

I wasn't super hyped to see this when I first saw the trailer to this in theater but it got me intrigued. Especially how it goes in a direction where a little girl doing action sequences didn't seem lame at all, in fact some sequences was pretty darn cool. They way it reveals what is going on bit by bit was nicely done without giving away exactly and completely what the movie is about in the beginning. Good character driven movie with some good action sequences with a slight artistic cinematography. What is great about this movie is that it isn't just straight forward action movie. Even the soundtrack doesn't have the typical generic action movie style soundtrack, in fact the soundtrack is great. The masses might find this movie to be a bit awkward because it doesn't have the generic action movie feel to it. The plot isn't spectacular but somewhat absorbing. Saoirse Ronan was sometimes mesmerizing with her acting and I buy into her situation in the movie while she was playing Hanna and I wouldn't be shocked if there is a bright future for her in the acting business. However if your one of those audiences that is expecting constant action might be left disappointed. But when it comes to action it shows that you don't need a lot of CGI to make some cool action sequences. And the movie might be a bit slow at times, especially in the middle but overall it's a character driven movie with action in it that is worth seeing. It's a simple story but has just enough substance.

7.8/10

This is a story about a unique and peculiar child named Hanna (Saoirse Ronan), on the run from presumably the CIA, finding out about herself and the world during a life-death struggle with a heartless American intelligence officer (Cate Blanchett). Blanchett scares as the cold and calculated killer spy trying to eliminate loose ends from an old case. Eric Bana is the protective father who excels at displaying the right emotions. The movie takes us from the serene and snowy arctic where Ronan grows up training to be an assassin to her travels across Europe with a quirky and clueless family on vacation to reach her target destination. We have an interesting performance by Tom Hollander as the evil accomplice chasing Ronan. An exciting ride.

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.