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Hanna is a 2011 European-American action thriller film that contains prominent fairy tale elements, directed by Joe Wright. The film stars Saoirse Ronan as the title character, and Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett. The film was released in North America on April 8, 2011 and in Europe on May 5, 2011.
The Editor says: As the most appalling decadence envelops the capitalist world, many of its movies reflect the putrefaction. Actioners of course excel at this. And this is one of them. All noise and ludicrous stunts calibrated to wow juvenile audiences, and using the cheap gimmick of a nubile sociopathic killer, this extended bore partially glorifies or cynically decries the deeds of US intel agencies, while serving as devious recruiting posters for precisely these entities.
BY HIRAM LEE, WSWS.ORG
In a cabin in the Arctic, Erik (Eric Bana), a rogue CIA agent, trains his young daughter, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan), to be an assassin. The two have lived like recluses all of Hanna’s life, in hiding from the CIA. The young girl appears never to have experienced the world.
Hanna is being trained to kill Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), another agent with whom Eric shares a dark history. Once Hanna’s training is complete, she flips a switch on a transmitter which alerts the CIA to her presence. Erik flees before the authorities arrive, with plans to rendezvous with his daughter again in Germany. Hanna allows herself to be taken into custody. The bulk of the film follows her escape and subsequent journey to reunite with her father in Berlin, fighting off mercenaries hired by the CIA along the way.
Hanna, directed by Joe Wright (born 1972), is a very insubstantial and contrived film. It bears some similarity to the series of films built around Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne character, in that it involves a former, essentially super-powered asset of the CIA seeking both freedom and revenge against the agency.
Like those films, the hero, or anti-hero, in Hanna is an expert killer, capable of inflicting sudden and brutal violence. One is meant to be impressed by—to find “cool”—the detached, unfeeling way in which Hanna brutalizes and kills her enemies. That her foes are the CIA and also brutal and unsympathetic is, to say the least, beside the point.
As with Source Code, when the filmmakers are forced to deal with human beings, and make attempts at generating feeling and emotion, the movie simply becomes tedious. A large section of the film—during which Hanna is introduced to a number of new life experiences, from her first time listening to music to her first kiss—is awkward and completely drained of inspiration or spontaneity.
Presumably, the filmmakers are attempting with these sequences to bring out the damage done to Hanna by her father and present her with the opportunity of renouncing everything she knows–violence and coldness—in favor of life, and new experiences. None of it comes through. If real life is as it is depicted in this film, one wonders why the girl doesn’t immediately run back to her cabin in the far north.
In any event, whether they are entirely conscious of it or not, the filmmakers have rendered the more violent and sadistic elements of their character the most alive and appealing. Hanna is just the latest in a long line of glorified revenge killers to have appeared in Hollywood thrillers and action movies in recent years. It is a deeply unhealthy phenomenon.
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