6/10
It's unusual to come across a chase movie that is part fairy story (of the Grimm variety), but after close metatextual analysis, I have decided that that's what it is. I'm just not sure how much I liked it.
My first instincts were all positive. It has a lot going for it: great locations, from snowy Finnish forests to Morocco, to Cordoba and Berlin, with never an American landscape in sight. Saoirse Ronan is outstanding in the central title role, and you can never go wrong when Cate Blanchett is in a film (Notes From A Scandal apart, of course). There's a pumping visceral techno soundtrack from The Chemical Brothers to accompany the chase and fight scenes, and the director (Joe Wright) manages to shoehorn a number of improbably juxtaposed genres into the same movie.
And yet. I'm left with doubts. The script seems to promise some kind of revelation explaining what the story is all about, but fails to deliver a punchline which is either clear or stunning, while the ending has a curiously offhand quality about it. I'm in no doubt that the fairy story subtext is important, but I'm not clear if it's more than window dressing.
Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) is a teenager with a difference. She's been raised by father Eric Bana on the fringes of the Arctic Circle, taught to hunt, fight, kill, and outrun anything and everything. The early scenes in their log cabin have a timeless quality about them, but it's only the preliminary to Hanna being released onto an unsuspecting world. Her mission is to kill (I think), but why her dad has spent 15 years training a superkiller teenage girl rather than just doing the job himself is just one of the many unanswered questions.
Out in the world (for which she is almost entirely unprepared), Hanna is captured but escapes before she can be interrogated, and then hooks up with an entirely different movie, in which a pair of hippie parents and their teenage kids on holiday in their camper van in Morocco take her under their wing. Meanwhile, Blanchett and her feral accomplice Tom Hollander (in a series of bad tracksuits) hunt her down, while Bana heads for an assignation in Berlin.
And there's the rub. There's an awful lot of running and chasing and fighting, and when it's all over, I was none the wiser. What was Hanna's relationship with Bana? And his with Blanchett? And why is Cate chasing after them? and what are the special powers Hanna has? It's all left open-ended and unexplained at the end, and I felt unsatisfied. Clearly there's a family theme here - the contrast between the British holiday family, and the strange arrangement between Hanna and her dad, and the suggestion that Blanchett is part of that family - but again it's not really followed through.
Ronan is a star, no question. She has the face, the repose, and the affair with the camera that can't be faked. She's at least 50% of the success of the film, and given that I enjoyed it more than I didn't, my best suggestion is for you to go and see it, and then post a comment either telling me how wrong I am or explaining everything I've failed to grasp. It's certainly unusual, and on balance, worth your time and money.
