‘Hanna’: Movie review and trailer

Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett star in most electric action thriller of the year

BY JOE TYRRELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

The most electric action thriller of the year, "Hanna" plugs folklore into a modern pulse.

In a snowy, scenic woodland, a teenage girl tracks and kills a magnificent stag, although her initial shot misses its heart. While she's intent on butchering it, a shaggy man comes up behind her and announces, "You're dead. I've killed you."

They fight and she gets the advantage, but holds back on killing him. As a reward, he tosses her onto her back and tells her to drag the carcass home. The hirsute man, Erik Heller, is apparently her father and a firm believer in tough love.

In earlier decades, child actors got to sing and dance, romp with their rascally pals, conspire with their conmen dads and only occasionally be the spawn of Satan.

But this is the 21st Century, and a few days short of her 17th birthday, Saoirse Ronan has already reached the pinnacle of contemporary acting: she's a killing machine.

As the eponymous Hanna, the pale Irish actress is raised in the woods for a very special purpose, eliminating an evil witch. The script, by Seth Lochhead and David Farr from Lochhead's original story, cleverly grafts fairy tale elements onto the usual spy fare to produce something new.

Flipping a switch on a beacon, Hanna triggers a signal that stirs something in even darker woods, CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. In particular, Hanna's magic beam alarms Marissa Weigler, an upper-echelon agent seen burning the file of a closed project.

Played by Cate Blanchett, with a Texas accent strained through clenched teeth, the alarmingly thin Marissa is almost too well-tailored, like a cross between Olive Oyl and a ferret.

Meanwhile, hairy Erik Heller cleans up into well-dressed Eric Bana, but in any coiffure and couture, he has issues with Marissa. In what is clearly an often repeated warning, he tells Hanna that either she will kill Marissa or Marissa will kill her. Then he's off, just before a SWAT team dressed like Kabuki ghosts descends on their peaceful cabin.

What follows is a tour of scenic or unsettling spots in Morocco and Europe, as Hanna and Erik head for a rendezvous in Berlin. Although director Joe Wright has steadily moved forward in time through "Pride and Prejudice," "Atonement" and "The Soloist," there's nothing in those substantive dramas to suggest he could stage these kinds of action set pieces.

But he establishes his bona fides early on, as Hanna escapes from a U.S. base/prison — a Bauhaus nightmare of concrete and steel with some high-tech labs thrown in to provide clues — into an even stranger space. (This is also one of the few parts of the movie where the tedious Chemical Brothers score adds to the excitement.)

Those earlier costumey dramas also serve Wright well as Hanna falls in with a family of British tourists. What the French call Bobos, bourgeois bohemians, these minor characters are not simply cannon fodder.

Instead, mom Rachel (Olivia Williams) and dad Sebastian (Jason Flemyng) believably relate to each other, as well as to this German girl they take for a backpacker. Their children, teenage Sophie (Jessica Barden) and little Miles (Aldo Maland) become her friends.

Not everything works. In one scene, Hanna freaks out at a roomful of electric appliances. Later, with only momentary hesitation, she gets on a computer and solves the central mystery. Meanwhile, Marissa's henchman are comic-book Euro types.

But Lochhead clearly benefited from reading the Grimm Brothers while watching "Bourne" movies and "The X-Files." "Hanna" plays like a well-conceived procedural episode from that series, augmented by settings that add flavor and often wit.

Even when the last 15 minutes turns into "Run, Hanna, Run" or "Run, Everybody, Run," the visuals raise the action above the routine spy movie.

It also helps to have a star like Saoirse Ronan, who can make the fantastic seem believable. There's no justification for anyone so young to be that talented; she just makes the rest of us look bad.

After this, Wright is back to the period pieces with "Anna Karenina," a reunion with Keira Knightley from "Atonement." He has been trying, so far unsuccessfully, to get Ronan on board. I'm already on Fandango, looking for tickets.

In the meantime, though, tickets to "Hanna" provide plenty of consolation, along with a happy adrenaline rush.

Joe Tyrrell may be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it