"Adapt or Die"
Hanna
is the kind of movie that fills the darkness of your driveway with overwhelming
menace. The violence and action linger because they are choreographed by a
master - that would be Joe Wright who has made startling beauty of physical
movement and ominous foreboding. It is unlike anything I have seen before. The
movie works beautifully for the first hour only to dissolve after that in the
prosaic mush of flowing blood and crushed bones common to ordinary action
movies. But let's get to that first good hour.
In a vast
frozen landscape, a hunter shoots an arrow into a deer who runs on for a while
before falling, then to be killed by a bullet from the hunter's pistol. The
hunter is Hanna, played with great skill and control by Saoirse Ronan. The
father who is coaching her is Erik (Eric Bana), an ex-CIA agent called in by the
agency and sent even further out into the cold to train his daughter to become
an invincible assassin. They have lived together in frozen isolation for all of
Hanna's 16 years.
By the time
we meet, Erik has taught Hanna the techniques of weaponry and martial arts with
an assassin's twist. In their small cabin he points to a box on their table and
tells her that when she is ready to go into the real world, she can simply flip
the red switch. When she decides to go, he warns, CIA agent Marissa Wiegler (the
wondrous, but here unfortunately robotic Cate Blanchett) will kill her on sight.
We are not told why. Hanna flips the switch, of course.
That's quite
a premise, and so is Hanna's trip to reality. Everything she sees is for the
first time: electricity, a computer, boats, cars, streets, cities, people - who
is evil, who is good? There's great fun in watching Hanna's surprise at a
shower, a fan, TV, a light bulb, a first kiss, though she reacts to anything new
as if it's a threat .
The steely
sharp Marissa sets a terrible tracker on Hanna's trail. He is ugly to the core -
a soft, fleshy blond pudding who whistles while he works. From this point
forward, Hanna uses her father's lessons: "Adapt or die; Gain the upper hand."
The artful dance of violence we have been watching crumbles into a long hour of
shootings, stabbings, explosions, and a race across Europe. The death toll
mounts before Hanna and Marissa finally meet in a fusillade of revelation and
violence that is almost too complex for a merely mortal audience to grasp.
You may be
okay with that, but do note that this PG-13 movie should have been rated R. As
it is, young children will now be able to see it "accompanied by an adult," and
they are likely to be haunted by its violence. If you are between 13 and 100,
you too may look over your shoulder for a few days.
Copyright (c) Illusion