Review: Hanna

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Despite a promising premise, Hanna tries too hard to meld "stranger in a strange land" with "spy versus spy" and trips over itself.

From the movie's opening shot, director Joe Wright (Atonement, Pride & Prejudice) sets the bar high, showing Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) as a gifted hunter being raised in isolation and without modern luxuries. However, the story often makes illogical choices to drive home Hanna's alienation and unfamiliarity with the modern world.

Co-writer David Farr has experience writing spy thrillers, having penned several episodes of the hit British series MI-5 (aka Spooks) about the UK equivalent of Homeland Security, a combination of espionage and frothy drama. The script penned with Seth Lochhead tries too hard to be clever, with more brute force than subtlety, sapping too much tension from what is clearly meant to be intelligent thriller. Most everything onscreen is too obvious, from Cate Blanchett's cold-blooded spy-master, to Hanna’s isolation and her lack of practical education from the man who raised her to be lethally self-reliant.

Hanna's cast is as heavy as the script, with talents such as Blanchett and Ronan backed up by less familiar but equally talented cast members such as Tom Hollander, Olivia Williams and Jason Flemyng ... all with their talents squandered onscreen. Ronan is the one character who consistently has an opportunity to rise above the material, and mostly manages to keep Hanna from being a caricature. She’s consistently proven an actor to watch in the future, even despite Hanna’s often ridiculous scenes underscoring how different she is from other girls. Blanchett gives a leaden performance with an exaggerated drawl and overly dramatic control of her emotion; such a waste of talent is criminal.

During the reveals, Hanna is disappointingly trite but not for lack of effort. It's clear Wright, Lochhead and Farr ambitiously tried to make a taut thriller. Unfortunately, when all is said and done, Hanna is simply too clever to be a truly enjoyable film.

[photo courtesy Focus Features]