Hanna

A 'different' movie. Bad storyline coupled with great direction / camera / sound. Technically brilliant. The net result is quite enjoyable. One does have to suspend disbelief to take in the gaps in logic, but once you do that, it's a good ride.

The entire movie is in effect a large chase, and the direction has brought about this element superbly. The camera work and sound kept me glued.

There seems to be quite a few reviews that talk of all the gaps in logic and reasoning in the movie. They are all true, but I found the high levels of technical brilliance more than made up for it.

In the end, not a 'great' movie, but one that I nevertheless quite enjoyed.

Forget the trouble you think you might have with a teenage daughter who smokes, drinks, swears and gets contraception from her friends in the playground then doesn't use it anyway.

Teenage girls can be quite a handful and Hanna is way more trouble than any other daughter could be because when she throws punches – people die. She's a ruthlessly trained assassin by her secret agent dad and with a blonde disguise over her ginger genes, she easily passes for a modern day example of the Hitler Youth.

Saoirse Ronan plays the lead role with a quiet intensity that echoes the character she played in Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones. But in Hanna she's not so much ethereal as she is lethal. Eric Bana plays her warm father who has the same concerns for his little girl as any dad – he wants her to be able to defend herself and survive in a world that's out to get her.

Cate Blanchett is a mother of sorts – mother to the subversive operation of destroying the father-daughter-killer-tag-team. But to me she looked like Julia Gillard on a ruthless rampage to restore order to a chaotic world surrounded by unreliably competent underlings.

The real success of this movie is director Joe Wright's ability to use every prop and every location in a highly provocative and meaningful way. Playgrounds are dangerous and decayed, snow is beautiful but unkind, daddies show they care by playing rough and demanding excellence and daughters murder then apologise for not doing it as well as they should have. The loss of childhood innocence would be tragic if it even existed in the first place.

Even the support cast and extras are homeless, baseless and nomadic like the leads. Everyone is on the move or on the run. But there is no escape.

I love wonderfully choreographed hand-to-hand combat action sequences and there are quite a few in Hanna – but I long for the day directors will return to holding wider shots so we can actually see the fighting take place. The constant rush of mid shots and close-ups with fast cutting detracts from a truly emotive fight sequence. Look at the footage of the beating of Rodney King – shot by an amateur – but you can't go past it for emotion. Hold a shot and you force the audience to watch. Every cut is a blink. And once the audience blinks – the emotional build-up is halted. Another great example of a terrifically shot fight sequence is in Coppola's The Godfather. Watch the unbridled fury in James Caan as Sonny as he gets increasingly carried away with bashing his brother-in-law. We get vital spatial awareness thanks to wide shots held long enough to turn us into gob-smacked witnesses. Now that's how you shoot a bashing sequence! Hanna has the menace of A Clockwork Orange and the inevitable pathos of Nikita while providing another example of what we are doing to destroy ourselves and our future. There are plenty of films about little girls whose circumstances and parenting options prevent them from being little girls for long – The Professional, Kick Ass and even Sucker Punch to some extent. But Hanna is the broken heart of modern youth from a broken family in a broken world that has cultivated a culture of making things that break then breaking them and throwing them all away like they didn't even matter in the first place.

Is Hanna a metaphor for raising a child in the post-modern world? What exactly do we need to teach our kids in terms of coping mechanisms and life skills? Is emotion now secondary to instinct and is that an insidiously smarter, more efficient way to live? We never really grow up. We just get bigger like the responsibilities heaped upon us. Our lives are terminally spent on swings and roundabouts in a spiralling state of disrepair so that playing games become less and less fun. And we all witness the mutilation of our childhood by the process of becoming older and so-called wiser.

If you haven't guessed it by now, Hanna isn't a cheery film. It's a grim fairytale.

Or maybe it's me. Chances are I've murdered my own childhood years ago. And what this movie has done is take me back there to identify the body.

It's worth seeing on the big screen.

This is a story about a unique and peculiar child named Hanna (Saoirse Ronan), on the run from presumably the CIA, finding out about herself and the world during a life-death struggle with a heartless American intelligence officer (Cate Blanchett). Blanchett scares as the cold and calculated killer spy trying to eliminate loose ends from an old case. Eric Bana is the protective father who excels at displaying the right emotions. The movie takes us from the serene and snowy arctic where Ronan grows up training to be an assassin to her travels across Europe with a quirky and clueless family on vacation to reach her target destination. We have an interesting performance by Tom Hollander as the evil accomplice chasing Ronan. An exciting ride.

Joe Wright's 'Hanna' opens with a teenager (the title character) hunting a reindeer in a snowy forest. What soon follows is a carefully choreographed and skillfully shot battle sequence between Hanna and the person who, as revealed sooner, happens to be her father. Wright holds the viewer's interest right from the very beginning and takes us through a mesmerizing chase as Hanna continues to fight and run. Although the pacing is slow at times, suspense is well maintained. There is some humour which is cleverly incorporated.

The exotic locations are pleasing to look at and the Chemical Brothers's unique score is magic. The cinematography, especially the long shots, are outstanding. Examples include the scene where Erik is being followed by Marissa's agents. The shootout scenes are also exceptionally well done. I only thought that the upside-down shots were sometimes overdone.

The performances are topnotch. Saoirse Ronan shows tremendous potential and proves that she can lead a film. Cate Blanchett is terrific as the ruthless Marissa even though her accent sounds odd at times. Erik Bana is brilliant with his restrained performance.

A slick thriller with strong performances, an awesome soundtrack and great suspense, what's not to like about 'Hanna'?

15-year-old girl Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) is a strange teenage girl. Uniquely, she has the strength, the stamina, and the skills of a soldier. These come from being raised by her father, Erik Heller (Eric Bana), an ex-C. I. A. Man, in the wilds of Finland. The turning point in her adolescence is a sharp one; sent into the world by her father on a mission, Hanna journeys stealthily across Europe on a RV owns a likeable family (Jared Harris , Olivia Williams, Vicky Krieps..) while eluding agents dispatched after her by ruthless intelligence operative, and old enemy Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), who has secrets of her own and to take down her fair-skinned target. As she nears her ultimate target, Hanna faces startling revelations about her existence and unexpected questions about her humanity. Adapt or DieYoung. Sweet. Innocent. Deadly. Innocence can be deadly.

Thrilling film with suspense , action-packed , and spectacular scenes to show tension and emotion enough . The main issue results to be a mysterious adolescent who has been living a life unlike any other teenager, her upbringing and training have been one and the same, all geared to making her the perfect assassin. Settings with different tones long, Morocco deserts and gorgeous sets in the Finnish wilderness where the gifted pupil has a put her rigorous training in the unforgiving to the test.

Director Joe Wright shoots very long, complicated tracking shots that display many events . Stars Saoirse Ronasn who gives a nice acting as the sweet and innocent-looking sixteen-year-old girl, Hanna who has devoted nearly all her life training for a single mission , while her father well played by Eric Bana as the ex-operative who raised her to be the perfect assassin is dispatched on a mission across Europe . While Cate Blanchett is fine as the formidable adversary , the ruthless C. I. A. Agent, Marissa Wiegler and is bent on eliminating her enemies

It packs a colorful and cold cinematography by cameraman Alwin H. Küchler shot in various locations in Morocco , Kemijärvi, Ruca , Finland , Leger, Lenggries, Bavaria, Hamburg ,Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Berlin, Germany . As well as rare , esoteric , psychedelic and new-age style musical score by Chemical Brothers. They're a British electronic music duo composed of Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons, which originated in Manchester in 1989 , they were pioneers at bringing the big beat genre to the forefront of pop culture . The motion picture was competently directed by Joe Wright , delivering action and fights enough , but being sometimes slow-moving . Joe Wright is an English film director. He is best known for Pride & Prejudice (2005), Atonement (2007), The Solist (2019) , Anna Karenina (2012), Pride and Prejudice , Pan , The Woman in the Window (2021) , Cyrano (2021) . Directed 3 Oscar-nominated performances: Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan, and Gary Oldman. Oldman won for his performance in Darkest Hour (2017). As of 2018, he has directed 2 films that have been Oscar nominated for Best Picture : Atonement (2007) and Darkest Hour (2017). Rating : 6.5/10 . Well worth watching,