Tough Chick

Movie: Hanna

My Rating: 3 stars

This is a pretty cool movie.  I knew I wanted to see it as soon as I saw the trailer.  A story about a badass chick, kicking butt and taking names—you can’t get much better than that in my opinion.  Plus, I’m a huge fan of Saoirse Ronan.  She’s an awesome actress, and she always brings something a little different to the table.  I’m not quite sure what it is.  Maybe it’s her confidence.  She’s a girl who isn’t afraid to look you in the eye.  Or, maybe it’s her unflinching poker face.  Any way you look at it, she’s the perfect actress to play the part of the half feral, survivalist chick who’s on a revenge mission.  She’s out for blood, and she’s going to get it.  The scariest part is how she’ll just casually snap her enemies’ necks, showing no emotion in those icy, blue eyes.  This is business—no place for anything wimpy like emotions.

But, this isn’t really a scary movie or anything.  It’s more of your standard thriller.  Eric Bana plays a man who has been raising his daughter Hanna (Ronan) in some isolated, arctic hideaway.  He’s a little eccentric, and has been teaching her all the basics of surviving in the wild—making a fire, killing and skinning caribou, avoiding ambush, close quarters, hand-to-hand combat—all the normal stuff a dad teaches his daughter.  But, dad has taught his little girl surprisingly little about interpersonal skills or communicating with others like a normal person.  But hey, he needs Hanna to complete a mission, and nothing should get in the way of that.  Hanna is supposed to exact revenge on the evil FBI agent (Cate Blanchett) who killed her mother.  You don’t need silly communication skills to do that sort of thing.

So, I did think this movie was pretty cool, although this is definitely one of those films where you pretty much get the whole story from the trailer.  And, the trailer is edited to be more exciting, too.  So the actual process of sitting through the slow pacing of the movie was a little bit of a let down for me.  This is especially the case since the movie doesn’t really add much new to the story, like character development, plot twists, or visual thrills that we didn’t see before.  That part was kind of a bummer.  The trailer is supposed to let you know why you’ll want to go see a film, not give you all the highlights from it.  Oh well.  It was a valiant effort.  But, if you’re going to spend this kind of money making a big budget thriller, wouldn’t you want to make sure it had legs?