Movie Review: Hanna

HANNA, (2011), Ardustry Entertainment, Marty Adelstein Productions, Studio Babelsberg, directed by Jon Wright, written by Seth Lochhead and David Farr, starring Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett, Eric Bana. 111 minutes run time, rated PG-13 for violence, action, some sexual material and language.

I usually go to movies such as this one by myself. The plot (from the trailer - no spoilers in this blog) indicates that Hanna (Sioirse Ronan) is a teenage girl being trained in a semi-arctic setting to survive in the wild. There is a connection between Hanna, her father (Eric Bana), a recruited CIA asset, and a rogue CIA case officer (Cate Blanchett). The plot is improbable in the extreme, tracing the genesis of Hanna to the MK Ultra Program. There are a lot of books and plots that do this, but none do it particularly well and it becomes incredible fiction rather than plausible fiction.

I didn't feel well this weekend and it may have tainted my viewing experience, however the movie struck me as a "European movie". My definition of a "European movie" is half a dozen Frenchmen sitting around, smoking, drinking and saying, "Life is shit" for two hours while the audience is bored. Hanna has implausible action complete with pseudo Nazi EuroTrash homosexual bad people, stereotypical British tourists in Morocco and weak and ineffective CIA people, none of whom can stand up to Hanna - and at times, to her father. 

If you can make it past the "life is shit" theme, silly violence and a generally transparent plot, it's not all THAT bad. Out of a possible TEN, it gets a FOUR from me.

It did have entertaining moments, and was not a complete waste of time because there was nothing on TV, and I paid matinee prices.