By Sumaya Samarasinghe - The Sunday Leader
Once upon a time, a lovely slim teenage girl is seen running through beautiful woods in Finland, the setting is fairly tale like but not for long.
Her blonde hair flows in the wind and suddenly she pulls out a bow and arrow and kills an enormous deer, larger than herself. While she is emptying the carcass of the animal she shoots out of his misery, a bearded man dressed in animal skin appears, attacking the young girl from behind after yelling “You are dead”! They end up tussling violently, the man overpowering the willowy teen and telling her that she needs to be more cautious next time.
We are soon made to understand that Erik, the Robinson Crusoe like muscular hero played by Eric Bana is Hanna’s father. He has kept his daughter Hanna (Saoirse Ronan from Atonement and Lovely Bones) in complete isolation since she turned two. Their home is a small wooden house hidden in the midst of Finland’s forests. They live “simply”, with no contact whatsoever with the outside world, and nothing but each other and some battered Grimms Fairy Tales books. We soon realise that Hanna has some strange skills, the results of years of training by her father who is turning her into a multilingual assassin. But the father senses that his little teenage killing machine who looks like a 12 year old child (which makes the idea of her being a killer even more disturbing) feels the urge to discover the outside world. So one day, Erik pulls out a transponder and tells Hanna that when she is ready to go into the outside world; all she needs to do is flick the button and the CIA will come after them.Hanna is suddenly flooded with unexpected information. Erik was a former CIA agent who has been on the run for nearly 14 years. Something in him makes him the obsessive bait of Marissa Wiegler, a CIA officer who immediately sends an entire legion of agents to capture Erik when the signal goes off. Of course he is not waiting passively to get caught. He and his daughter have planned to meet in Berlin at her grandmother’s apartment. Hanna is captured and taken to a safe house in Morocco; but, Marissa realises that catching Hanna was a little too easy and she sends a body double to talk to the young girl. Hanna kills the fake Marissa, breaks free from the compound and confronts the real world for the first time.While running away in the desert, she comes across a British family on vacation and the daughter Sophie (Jessica Barden who is excellent but reprises a role way too similar to the one she had in Tamara Drewe) who thinks this blonde and icy blue eyed girl is a “refugee from Sri Lanka”, (yes you read right!) befriends her. This is the first time Hanna meets a girl her age and is confronted with the concept of family.Hanna will learn what it is to behave like a normal teenager without, however, forgetting her mission to join her father in Berlin with of course Marissa and her team of killers trying to bring Erik and Hanna down at every single point.There are several very positive aspects to the movie. Firstly, the impressive and energetic directing by Joe Wright to whom we owe the wonderful Atonement, Pride and Prejudice and The Soloist. Any director who can coordinate shooting in locations as different and tough as the forests in Finland, Germany and Morocco deserves some respect! But he also manages to extract extremely good performances from his entire cast. Eric Bana does not have to do much other than look muscular, handsome and vulnerable; Cate Blanchett is one day going to be called one of the greatest actresses ever. Here as Marissa, she is a ruthless and icy CIA agent who is slightly obsessive about her suits, her shoes and her teeth! There may be a tad bit of over acting on her part which makes her character bordering on caricature. But there is also something a little vulnerable and sad as she is quite obviously a very lonely woman who has unfulfilled dreams of motherhood.Saoirse Ronan, will leave you breathless. She seems so fragile and incapable of anything including carrying an entire film on her frail shoulders. But she does it, like she did before, each time surprising you with the intensity of her acting. Some people are just born effortless actors, Ronan is one of them and her choice of roles have clearly indicated which acting career path she will be following. Doubtful she will star in American Pie or Twilight style films and if so, I cannot wait to see what adult roles she will eventually pick.
The very clear European touch to the film, its British director, great cast and a super soundtrack by the Chemical Brothers, make Hanna a film not to be missed.
