I’m gonna tell you an embarrassing story about myself. In high school, when I was in the theater group, we put on a production of Jules Feiffer’s play Little Murders. (You can hunt down Alan Arkin’s film version starring Elliot Gould if you are curious.) There was a part when the lights got all red and I had to run backstage and around through the gymnasium at top speed as our sound guy blasted “Tunic (Song for Karen)” by Sonic Youth. I loved it. The music was pumping, the red filters looked great, it was a blast of pure excitement.
It wasn’t until years later that I realized just how lousy I was in that dopey play.
I mention all this because Joe Wright’s new film Hanna has some marvelous clips floating around the Internet. Saoirse Ronan does a lot of running to the music of the Chemical Brothers with cool flashing lights. It is tailor-made for promotional material, a sound and light show that’ll hopefully get you intrigued.
When the beats and the color saturation fades, we’re left with nothing but a very surface, very uninteresting story. Hanna (Ronan) is raised to become an ultimate warrior by her off-the-grid intelligence agent father (Eric Bana). She’s been eating raw elk and learning fifteen languages her whole life for one single purpose: to murder Cate Blanchett.
Blanchett works for “The Agency” and we can tell that she is evil because she takes really good care of her teeth. She, Bana and Ronan engage in a lengthy game of cat-and-mouse that ultimately leads to an abandoned German fairy tale-themed amusement park.
Listen, Hanna is not without its evident charms. Saoirse Ronan fashioning weapons out of common items and Eric Bana taking on a circle of G-Men in a 360 degree long-take to some “block rockin’ beats” is the clay from which wonderful sequences are molded. I simply found myself unable to truly care about the outcome of the story.
It isn’t for lack of Joe Wright trying. There’s a wonderful middle section of the film where Hanna stows away with a British family as they travel through Morocco and Spain. Bana has prepared our young heroine for every possible conflict scenario, but has done nothing to socialize her. She drinks out of swimming pools and offers up name, rank and serial number facts about herself without appropriate provocation.
Hanna is loaded with a number of these finely observed details, and the counterpoint to the most straightforward action scenarios this side of David Mamet’s Spartan is interesting. But it doesn’t fully connect.
The below video was shot while I was still in the "I liked it, despite it not being original" afterglow.
