User Reviews

First of all, this is not a cerebral thriller, nor a Jason Bourne, or a James Bond. But it is one hell of a movie. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, then fell back laughing once or twice. Many will say it was dreadful, but the truth is, it requires thinking once you walk out of the theatre. You might have to decide for yourself why the program of genetics was shut down, or why Erik had to be killed, but in truth the movie is about Hanna, and the way she adapts to new environments and a new life. Yes there are plot holes, but you can watch Gladiator and see utter wrongs done to the portrayal of the Romans, or Star Wars with its space opera plot holes. Yes Hanna is not perfect, not even Oscar worthy, but it makes for hell of an interesting movie.

First, I'm just an average viewer, not a fledgling movie critic, and these are just some random observations I had while watching.

The main actors are all accomplished, and the movie contains interesting scenes in Finland, Morocco, and a derelict German amusement park. The soundtrack by the Chemical Brothers was different, varied, and fit some scenes very well- IMHO, especially duringHanna's escape from the underground military facility somewhere in the Moroccan desert, and a weird, sort of David Lynch-ian scene of weirdos loitering in the Berlin bus station. Cate Blanchett's ultra-sophisticated poisonous green Armani wardrobe sometimes held my attention as much as the plot; (I mean, maybe her side job as an assassin helped pay for those $800 green kidskin gloves.) And about the plot. Okay, suspension of disbelief and all that - but I kept wondering, if Hanna wanted to experience the world outside of the arctic, why didn't she (and Eric, for that matter) just go? They'd been off the grid for 15 years, and no one was actively looking for them; they could have slipped away and lived for months or years anonymously anywhere. Instead, inexplicably, they decide to trip an ELT locator beacon, and immediately alert Marisa Weigler as to their whereabouts. It was such a 'duh' moment, that I kept thinking about it throughout the movie. That being said, I still watch it whenever it's on cable, so I'll admit it's fairly good, despite any flaws.

This film was derivative of many other films including (Soldier, Resident Evil), with little new in the way of plot. The immoral CIA creates a program in which they are attempting to genetically create the perfect soldier by fooling with the DNA of embryos. When the experiment proves successful (huh..? Why shut down a successful program..?) it is decided for unknown reasons to end the project and terminate all those involved. Eric Bana, the CIA field agent who recruited the women for the experiment has a change of heart and tries to save one woman and her child. For no particular reason, except to give Hanna a reason to want revenge later on, the mother is killed by Kate Blanchett, and Eric Bana escapes with the infant. Bana raises Hanna as his own in an "arctic" cabin without electricity or modern conveniences, in order to prepare her for the day that she has to face the CIA and their henchmen. The day finally arrives when Hanna decides that she is ready. Bana digs up a transponder he had buried and places it in front of Hanna quipping that once the switch is flipped it can't be undone. Since there is no electricity in the cabin, and in fact Hanna has never seen an electric light, the method by which Bana got a battery to operate after over 14 years is never explained. Bana leaves Hanna alone to be captured by the dastardly CIA operatives. He did this apparently in order for Hanna to kill Kate Blanchett. Why he doesn't take Hanna with him, instead of leaving her to be taken by the CIA is left unexplained. Hanna is brought to an underground holding cell, the size of the Superbowl, in Morocco.

Strangely, Morocco looks a lot like the desert southwest of the US. Naturally, Hanna is more than a handful for the loutish CIA operatives and manages to escape through the ubiquitous air-conditioning vents which just happen to be her size. She makes her way to the surface, and just as she is looking out of a vast desert vista in broad daylight, Hummvees start driving directly over her head, apparently oblivious to the fact that there is an open submarine door in their path. As the last Hummvee passes the hole is shown as empty clearly showing that Hanna has managed to take hold of the undercarriage of the last vehicle as it passed at 50 mph, where she hangs on similar to Robert De Niro as Max Cady in the 1991 film "Cape Fear". Too bad nobody told the director about this same treatment by the "Simpsons" with Sideshow Bob. I'm sure I'm not the only one surprised by the location of Morocco for this CIA detention cell, instead of somewhere in the US. It becomes obvious later on when Hanna has the opportunity to show off her dexterity with languages, which wouldn't have come up in the US quite so easily. Also, since it was decided by the Director to have the final fight scene in an amusement park in Germany, the CIA detention center had to be someplace from which Hanna could conceivably get to Germany, without a passport or any ID.

At one point in the film Eric Bana picks up a post card at a post office, apparently where they've been holding his mail for the past 14 years, and there's a postcard from Hanna telling him in code she has killed Kate Blanchett, which is unfortunately incorrect. How she bought the stamp, mailed the postcard, or knew which post office Bana would be near is unexplained. The fact that all of this action takes place in a matter of a few days, makes the idea that a post card can get from Morocco or Spain to Germany in that amount of time laughable to anyone who has lived overseas.

There are several editing or continuity errors, like when Hanna kills the reindeer with a bow and arrow, but then guts a reindeer of approximately half the size, and then brings the originally sized reindeer home on a sleigh, apparently having made the sleigh from the raw materials by hand.

The choice of where and when to use blood spatter effects is also interesting. Hanna gets her face splashed when shooting people, and the picture in front of grandma gets covered when Kate Blanchett kills her (again for no reason), but the reindeer is remarkably without blood, even though Hanna is in the process of gutting it.

If you can willingly suspend your disbelief for this film, then you really have no disbelief to suspend.

The story is derivative, the characters are two dimensional and without motivation, the lines are full of clichés, and the violence is unrealistic. Eric Bana is supposed to be the Zen like trainer of Hanna, but he can't seem to handle a Aryan Brotherhood with a knife. I suppose 12 year old girls will like the scene where Hanna flips a Spanish boy who tries to kiss her, but her reactions were closer to that of someone suffering from anti-social personality disorder than of a normal teenager.

The fact that Hanna kills people for little or no reason would seem to suggest that she is in fact meant to be characterized as a serial killer, except that she announces to Eric Bana that she doesn't want to hurt anyone anymore, when all she really needs to do is to stop hurting people.

I found it disconcerting that Eric Bana had spent 14 or so years training Hanna to kill everything that moves, when the CIA was unaware of his or her actual existence. He could just as easily have changed his name and raised Hanna on a ranch in Idaho or a tenement in the South Bronx, but then there wouldn't have been as much of a story, as such.

Call me simple if you like ;). Statement: The movie is (inadequatley stated) trash. One moment she is in Arizona (Morocco doesn't look like this, second point there aren't huge underground American air bases in Morocco) next she is in north Africa. Also the story is pointless and over dramatic. Visiuals and camera movement and the soundtrack are quite gripping, though. It might have made better in a Sci-Fi setting. Also it is physically impossible for a girl of such a light frame to have this kind of strength... Anyway, each to his own. Also it wasn't that entertaining P.S. Littl girl obsessions...some directors just have them.

I became interested in seeing Hanna because of the trailers. I am a fan of Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett also. I expected more than I got. It was good at first the set up with Hanna and her father; the bad lady chasing them. It was the usual super human person escaping harm through their strength and wits. I enjoyed the part when Hanna reaches the real world and the time she spends with regular people, especially a normal, annoying English teenager and her free spirit mother. But then the film deteriorates into one chase scene after another; one scene of stylized violence after another. After so much chasing and so much killing the ending becomes anti-climatic. 5/10

What is Hanna? it certainly isn't what I thought it'd be. At all. Chances are it isn't like anything you've seen before. Weird, wild and beautiful, it's Jason Bourne by way of the Brothers Grimm, David Lynch by way of Hans Christian Andersen, Luc Besson and Tom Tykwer by way of huntsmen, evil witches and big, bad wolves. It doesn't hesitate, it hurtles along. It doesn't flinch, it charges. It prowls and pounces, haunts and disarms. It has a pulse, a heartbeat, a rhythm. It roars. It cackles. It sings a lullaby. It hums. It whistles. And, really, you should stop reading right there. The joy is in the discovery, as they say, and Hanna is best served with as few expectations as possible. Whether you ultimately find it baffling or bewitching is, frankly, beside the point. It's well worth watching -- experiencing, rather -- and you'll be hard- pressed to deny the thrill of such a bizarre, breathtaking ride.

Once upon a time there was a very special girl named Hanna Heller (Saoirse Ronan). Since she was two-years-old, Hanna has lived in the secluded forests of Finland with her father, Erik (Eric Bana). There, she's learned to survive, hunt, fight... and kill. When she turns sixteen, her father decides she's ready to hear the truth and to be presented with a choice: continue living in seclusion or flip a switch on a dormant tracking device and alert a vindictive CIA chief, Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), to her whereabouts. It seems Marissa has been searching for Erik and Hanna since she failed to assassinate the pair fourteen years ago, and Hanna is all too anxious to meet the woman who murdered her mother and sent her father into hiding. The choice is simpler than Erik had hoped. Hanna flips the switch the moment he steps away from the cabin. And then? Then all hell breaks loose. Hanna, captured and taken to a CIA facility in Morocco, kills a woman she believes is Wiegler, steals intel about her true origins, escapes into the desert and hitches a ride with a family of tourists bound for Germany, where she plans to rendezvous with her father. But she'll have to stay one step ahead of Marissa in a strange, alien world of television, traffic and the internet, and dodge the CIA witch's fiends, led by the maniacal Isaacs (Tom Hollander).

Hanna leaps over vast genre chasms with the grace of the fully realized dark-fantasy, action- thriller hybrid it is. Director Joe Wright has created something so wholly in tune with his vision, so true to its own delirious delights and hard-hitting flights of fancy that it floats high above the Hollywood fray. It begins simply enough, explodes soon thereafter, and then slowly reveals its secrets and intentions with meticulous precision, descending into increasingly offbeat, grotesque territory only after enchanting viewers with its siren call. Wright pushes, sure. But he knows exactly how much to push his audience at any given moment. He challenges convention, but knows just how much pressure to apply. He demands a lot of those watching the film for the first time, but never more than they should be able to bear. (And Hanna is even better on repeat viewings.) His mad-hatter action opera doesn't overwhelm or overreach; it hypnotizes, mesmerizes and casts a spell with fierce fist fights, coming-of-age tenderness, cruel villains, audaciously long tracking shots (complete with brawls sans cutaways or cheap edits), dazzling photography, and organic electronica (from The Chemical Brothers, no less).

Ronan doesn't buckle beneath the weight of Hanna or Hanna, and approaches every scene with the same killer instinct her adolescent assassin approaches an assailant. Wright and Ronan seem acutely aware of how easily the film could plummet over the edge and adapt (or die) accordingly, creating a young protagonist both beyond her years and subject to childlike awe. (Hanna squeals with girlish excitement at the sight of a passing plane mere moments after gutting a deer and battling her father on a frozen lake.) Elsewhere, Blanchett gobbles down helpless scenes with toothy vehemence and devilish zeal (she's the Wicked Stepmother, the Foul Enchantress and the Evil Queen), Hollander licks his deranged chops and bears his fangs with sick pleasure, and Bana brandishes his best Bana -- the somber but soulful soldier -- and lends balance to an eccentric ensemble. The travelers Hanna joins -- a family played with flaky bohemian funk by Jason Flemyng, Olivia Williams and kinetic ball of energy Jessica Barden -- may be the straw that crack some filmfans' backs, but their presence is only jarring initially and only the first time through. Further viewings (and a bit of patience) illuminate their true purpose -- no wandering fairy tale princess would be complete without a band of quirky creatures and peculiar new friends, be they dwarfs, talking forest denizens or free- spirited European hippies -- and make them every bit as essential to Hanna as anything else. It's through her temporary surrogate family that she learns things her father neglected to teach her, for reasons that become painfully clear as the film nears its endgame.

But not everyone will be so forgiving. Hanna is a divisive genre-bender that will infuriate as many cinephiles as it entrances. Even if you and I typically see eye to eye, we may not this time around. Wright's fourth feature film defies expectation and explanation, and must be seen to be believed. It may not ensnare you, but it'll sink its claws in for two spellbinding hours. Hanna will probably make its way onto my Top Ten list this year, and it will undoubtedly find its way onto some of your lists as well, albeit as one of the Worst Films of 2011. You'll just have to brave its dark, demented forests to find out.

Contains spoilers: This film, Hanna, was god-awful. I was angry when I left the theatre after ruining my afternoon watching a film with such a stupid, faulty plot. There are just too many mistakes and holes. Hanna is a 16 year old ANOREXIC-LOOKING supposed genetic super human. Right away you know the casting is all wrong. She looks so weak. Sometimes she kills commandos immediately, and then other times she fights with skin-head caricatures for hours it seems. Silly stuff. To view this film's comments, use the "hated it" filter. I think the film's cast and backers shamelessly used IMDb.com for their selfish, untrue, and dishonest promotion of the film. No one with half a brain would recommend this film. There are plot holes which should anger you. Also, we are never told why she has to die or why the skinny little girl is a threat to US security. Why does she look longingly, lesbian-like into her new friend's eyes as they are lying in bed together? What happens to that girl and her family? We are not told. What did her foster-father ever do to deserve such treatment from her at the end? He then sacrifices his life for her! She has knowledge of everything in the world, but acts like one of the Beverly Hillbillies when it comes to turning on a light or using electric appliances, but then she just walks into a computer/coffee café and goes online. This is one of the dumbest films of all time. I was just so angry to have wasted my time and money on this film that was rated so highly on IMDb. Why does this film deserve a 7.7 rating? 7.7 Oh, please. Something is really, really wrong with the ratings system if this can happen.

Spoilers: See first! First off, what's with these so called expert killers Kate brings into the mix to get the girl? There fat, out of shape and more like clockwork orange hoodlums, that couldn't win a bar fight let alone beat a superior, fighting hybrid! If all the hybrids (for a lack of a better word) had to be 'terminated' and Hanna was the last left, think about this..., here's Kate keeping up with her, in heels! chasing her and Hanna was not able to put distance between them? The point is: If that's all the hybrid can do, WHY does the U.S. have to see her dead? (Obviously, she's not all that bloody superior if that old, British broad is out thinking her! And how do the clockwork orange goons ever find her in Morrocco? Was that the ONLY seedy, little joint in the whole country that the lugs somehow knew that's the one she'd be at? Give me a break.

Why doesn't it reveal whether the British couple and their kids were killed or not? Anyone who can jump onto an undercarriage of a Humvee while traveling over them at speed is frankly, CARTOON! And WHY does Eric, after waiting 13-years in hiding near the Arctic Circle, with a beard and long hair, suddenly cut his hair/have to look...EXACTLY like his file photos, to be instantly recognizable when he leaves the forest? Senseless. And oh BTW, he leaves in suit in sub zero temps. Hello~

What in the world were Kate's gums bleeding for? It has nothing to do with the plot at all! When Eric fights the 3 guys in the vacant space, when the thugs after incredible hesitations, finally do decide to fire their weapon, Eric had time to through one of them into the line of fire and throwing a knife to kill the gunmen. To coin a classic line from Eli Wallach about clowns just like these losers..., "If you're going to shoot...SHOOT. Don't talk!" Great acting by Hanna, for sure!