A really good movie trailer can get its hooks so deep in you that you actually find yourself – a grown adult with actual responsibilities in life – carrying around two months worth of excitement for what promises to be a great two hours.
When that happens, disappointment is almost sure to follow. Hollywood promises are almost always empty promises.
So it is with the kind of frustration born of over a month of lying to ourselves about ‘this time being different’ that we take a look at the feature film “Hanna” on Take a Movie to Work at Declaration Entertainment.
Of course, it’s not all bad. This isn’t a Roland Emmerich movie after all. The first twenty minutes of Hanna are fabulous. The film opens in the bleak, barren wilderness of arctic Finland where a wild-looking young girl – Hanna – stalks a caribou through the frozen woods. The remoteness of the setting is accentuated perfectly by the utter lack of score or dialogue. When Hanna looses her hand-made arrow, the only sounds are hoof beats and panting.
As Hanna cleans her game, a man appears behind her. “You’re dead,” he says, “I’ve killed you.” A moment later, Hanna charges the man in a no-holds-barred fight that might leave either of them dead.
The man is Hanna’s father, Erik Heller – played by the always capable Eric Bana – a former operative for the CIA who has brought his charge to this rural wilderness to raise her, off the grid, and train her to be a self-sufficient, multi-lingual, brutal assassin. While the relationship is built on struggle, the love the two share for each other is palpable.
Saoirse Ronan as Hanna is brilliant, subtle and powerful, but able to perfectly communicate the child within the killer. In the end, all Hanna wants it to finally be a part of the world she has only heard about in stories.
The trouble is that for reasons that are mysterious in the beginning, the only way Hanna can ever taste of that world is to first confront the past that has driven her and her father to the edge of the world to begin with.
Man, just revisiting this set-up makes you want to see the movie again. So much promise. Terrific actors, mysterious pasts, the promise of a nearly insurmountable struggle. This movie couldn’t be off to a better start.
Tragically, that is about as far as it ever gets.
SPOILER ALERT!
After an incredibly compelling action sequence in which Hanna reveals her power to her CIA captors, killing many men double her size and shooting out the cameras that surround her in the concrete holding cell, HANNA the film utterly changes. Actually, ‘falls apart’ might be a more accurate statement.
Gone are the stark, slow, quiet scenes that so enthralled in the set-up. In their place, a music video of grating techno music, distractingly fast-paced editing, and 1970s reminiscent camera work that takes the viewer completely out of the world of the film and leaves them thinking far more about their hatred for hipster director Joe Wright than whether or not the heroine will escape. (In the interest of fairness, it should be noted that perhaps the most impressive steadicam shot in the history of cinema does occur about halfway through the film when Eric Bana does an entire, multi-location action sequence in a single, uninterrupted take, but it stands alone amid the utterly distracting camera work that mares the rest of the film).
Oh, and there are lots and lots of inexplicably flashing lights. Hanna has never seen working electricity before. Apparently the CIA hasn’t either.
From this point on, there are more plot-holes than running sequences – and there are A LOT of running sequences as Hanna makes her away from Africa – where the CIA naturally has giant, underground, saucer-shaped-concrete fortresses – to Berlin to rejoin her father.
Along the way, she encounters an unlikely cast of characters (unlikely because there is no one like them on Earth), from the wonderfully acted but miserably condescending British hippie family – a family so liberal that they think it is a charming alternative parenting style to allow a beautiful, blonde, under-aged girl to wonder around Muslim Northern Africa alone – to the hermaphroditic pornographer assassin, to the vaudevillian carney safe-house operator who has the iron will to withstand torture but not, apparently, to get a job.
The good guys are all liberals, of course, or people that liberals reduce to characters.
The bad guys are Americans, from the American operatives and soldiers she spends the first half of the movie killing to Cate Blanchett, the cold, barren agent with the deep southern drawl who murdered Hanna’s mother years before.
What little storytelling occurs in the second two-thirds of the film is tired and stale. Super-soldier, evil American government, blah-blah-blah.
No explanation is ever given to why the well-trained, genetically enhanced Hanna can so ably defeat scores of trained American soldiers in the first act, but then spends the rest of the film running like a helpless child from three German thugs. She even lets the thugs presumably murder the only friends she has ever had she is so terrified of facing them, which seems even more ludicrous a few scenes later when her none-genetically-enhanced father kills two of them with his bare hands…
In the end, this film is just a two-hour, mildly anti-American music video – and the music sucks. If you want a really good time, just watch the trailer again…
For more on this film, and for top-notch political video commentary, see Bill Whittle’s review on TAKE A MOVIE TO WORK at Declaration Entertainment.
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