'Hanna' Movie Review

Hanna is an interesting tale about a teenage girl who happens to be a highly trained killing machine, and she's on the hunt for the CIA operative who killed her mother. It stars Eric Bana, Cate Blanchett, and Saoirse Ronan, and is from the director of Atonement and The Soloist.

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This movie is sort of like a teenage girl version of The Bourne Identity. The first half hour covers the girl (Saoirse Ronan of The Lovely Bones) going through extensive training in self defense, weapons, stealth and other ninja-like skills. Her father (Eric Bana) is constantly preparing her for a showdown with their arch enemy, a woman (Cate Blanchett) from the CIA. When she's finally ready, the switch is thrown on a homing beacon and soon thereafter a bunch of guys arrive via helicopter and take Hanna prisoner. She promptly busts out of her confinement and begins a cross country trek to catch up with Blanchett and complete a planned rendezvous with her father.

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From the start, it's obvious that Hanna is no ordinary girl. Not just because her father has spent her whole life training her up to be an assassin, but because she has extraordinary strength and is very smart. As the story goes along, it hints at how she got these superhuman powers and it isn't until toward the end that everything is explained. Needless to say, she is a force to be reckoned with.

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A half dozen different countries are shown in this movie, and it does a convincing job of making use of the locations. It starts out in a remote part of Finland, then later she finds herself in Morocco, then in Berlin, and so on. It's all over the place. Part of the reason for this is that Hanna's sheltered upbringing failed to give her any true exposure to the outside world, so she's seeing all these places and things for the first time. She walks around looking completely bewildered by all the sights and sounds of these locations, but quickly snaps into action once the bad people show up.

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The action scenes were very good in this, especially some of the fight fights. Eric Bana gets one scene where he takes down four different guys in a subway and it's all done in one continuous shot so it looked very realistic. There are a few foot chase sequences and some good stunts, too. Ronan does a great job with her fight scenes and she busts a few noggins, too. Her fights also came off as realistic and avoided the silly gravity-defying wire work you see too often in action movies these days. Instead of using video game style martial arts, she just punches and kicks the crap out of the bad guys. That's how it should be.

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Saoirse Ronan is great in this movie because she can handle the physical action and the drama both quite well. She's a great actress and shows more promise with every role she takes on. Eric Bana is also good even though he doesn't have a lot to do, but he does get a couple of good fight scenes. Cate Blanchett, I hate to say, was not very good in this. She spoke with a horrible fake Southern accent that made her character seem a bit ridiculous. I just didn't buy her as the cold-hearted character she played. I happen to be a real Southerner and we don't all talk like that, you know?

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The movie could have used less colorful villains and ditched the fake accents, but overall it wasn't boring or too over the top.