'Hanna' review: Bogus premise, but Ronan great
Mick LaSalle, Chronicle Movie Critic
San Francisco Chronicle April 7, 2011 04:00 AM
Friday, April 8, 2011
Focus Features
ALERT VIEWER Action drama. Starring Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett and Eric Bana. Directed by Joe Wright. (PG-13. 114 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)
Saoirse Ronan is a pretty young actress whose gaze is just disquieting enough to make sense of "Hanna," about a teenage killing machine. Like a Nordic Madonna in a late 15th century painting, she has an open-eyed stillness that can suggest either internal peace or an absence of human feeling. Both suggestions fit nicely in "Hanna."
The movie gets off to an unsettling start, though it may be the wrong kind of unsettling. The opening sequence shows young Hanna, traversing the snowy woods, hunting a caribou. Because the movie lacks a seal from the American Humane Society, I can't report on whether the animal was harmed or not. But certainly one of two things is true: Either a fine animal was sacrificed in order to make a colossally unimportant movie. Or Creative Artists Agency needs to sign the caribou, because that animal can act.
Joe Wright directs "Hanna" with all the vigorousness and psychological astuteness that he brought to "Atonement," but he might as well have spent two years polishing a rock. The rock is shiny, but no one will ever mistake it for a diamond or even a garnet. Ronan plays a girl raised in the woods by her father (Eric Bana) to be a killer, knowing that as soon as she re-enters the world, elements within the American intelligence community will be coming after her. He trains her in weapons and tests her reflexes by putting a gun to her head when she is asleep.
The movie's premise is essentially bogus, in that Hanna and Dad have been off the grid for 16 years and no one is looking for them. They could easily just slip back into society under assumed names. Instead, they announce themselves, in order to provoke a direct confrontation with an evil intelligence officer played by Cate Blanchett, who, for this role, assumes precisely the kind of Southern accent that, in movies, always means trouble.
Aspiring to intelligence, "Hanna" eschews the jolly and appealing heartlessness of an action thriller like "Salt" and invites us, instead, to respond as though these horrors were really happening. So the killings are personal, and the world is gloomy and claustrophobic, and yet all that bad feeling is inspired by a movie that, in the end, is no smarter than any other run-of-the-mill cinematic death fest, just grimmer, bleaker and sadder.
Still, those who meet the movie on its own terms and don't expect a masterpiece may appreciate the commitment of Wright and the actors. Blanchett goes out of her way, for example, to be repellent here. Thin as a cartoon villain and with her hair dyed red and arranged in some round cut that announces her vanity and cluelessness, she is the incarnation of smug, protected evil. Waiting to see her get what's coming to her becomes the second most compelling reason to keep watching.
The first is Ronan, who at only 16 has remarkable thinking eyes and a serious actor's intelligence. In one scene, she rides on the back of a motorcycle, and the driver asks, "Are you scared?" She answers, "Of what?" with innocence and faint confusion, and yet without hitting it too hard. She just tosses off the question knowing it will land, and in that moment, she gives us the character.
-- Advisory: Lots of violence, and most of it isn't fun.
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