Hanna (2011)

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

Fmovies: Well filmed, directed, acted and presented. The story gripped me from the start, it has comedy, pathos, excellent action scenes... everything you'd ask for in a film of this type. Ignore the bad reviews and watch it.

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 t

Hanna fmovies. Let's get the obvious out of the way, shall we? The plot is derivative of so many other things it's not true, with Nikita being the obvious reference point. The acting isn't particularly strong, the script is barely adequate and the plot is neither internally coherent nor believable. In other words it's like every other action film ever made from Bond to Bourne and all points between. So what was everyone expecting who went to see this movie? Shakespeare?

On the other hand I would rate this as one of those rare experiences of seeing pure film. That is to say that there is the perfect marriage between image and music that makes it something quite different to the normal. The composition and direction of this film are really quite extraordinary with scene after scene catching the eye and making the commonplace clichés of the action genre seem fresh. The choice of music is inspired and the way that is has been synced to the action serves to heighten the tension in the scenes.

The film also manages to avoid the usual problem of over-reliance on CGI with the effects that are used being spare and for a reason. At one point we have a chase and fight in a container port and I was expecting the worst. Where did this scenario come from? I suspect it was one of the early Dirty Harry films and the container port shootout/chase has since become a compulsory element in all bad action movies and features in multiple episodes of TV thrillers. In 99 times out of 100 it's lazy, it's boring and it's the same as every other one you've seen. Well Joe Wright has done the seemingly impossible by making his container port scene exciting and different.

Look, you're not going to learn the meaning of life or even the meaning of the plot by watching this movie. If you enjoy cinema however, and by that I mean the use of images, light and music to propel the story then I think you'll like this.

A 'different' movie. Bad storyline coupled with great direction / camera / sound. Technically brilliant. The net result is quite enjoyable. One does have to suspend disbelief to take in the gaps in logic, but once you do that, it's a good ride.

The entire movie is in effect a large chase, and the direction has brought about this element superbly. The camera work and sound kept me glued.

There seems to be quite a few reviews that talk of all the gaps in logic and reasoning in the movie. They are all true, but I found the high levels of technical brilliance more than made up for it.

In the end, not a 'great' movie, but one that I nevertheless quite enjoyed.

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.