‘Hanna’ is adrenanline incarnate

Joe Wright’s exquisite Hanna is a throwback to an era when international thrillers were lethally bad ass, featuring espionage, hand-to-hand combat and actual character development. This movie has the goods.

Saoirse Ronan offers another impressive performance (she was previously nominated for an Oscar for Atonement), and Cate Blanchett is equally cunning. Sure, Eric Bana gets overshadowed by the women, but that’s no fault to his fine work as well.

Living in the dense wilderness of Finland, Hanna (Ronan) is a young woman who has learned the tools of self-survival from her former-CIA-agent father, Erik (Bana). She is able to hunt by herself, cook over the stove and fight her father to near death. Like a samurai or Jedi, she has been taught well (Yoda would be proud). With her training comes the inevitable yearning to escape the snow-packed terrain of northern Europe and see the world. The lessons that Hanna learns in the textbooks that her father has her read convince her that the mind needs freeing.

The reason behind her vigorous training is because Erik wants to send his daughter, now a bona fide assassin, on a mission. The young girl is unsure of where the journey will take her, but has the blueprints of the different people and meet-up points she needs to find.

And once released, hell hath no fury like a fair-skinned girl taught to kill in the woods. She is deadly — think Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.

At the same time, Marissa (Blanchett), a CIA agent with an intimate knowledge of Erik’s past work, pulls together all of her resources to find Hanna and Erik. Everyone is chasing after something, and only until the end do we discover the payoff.

Wright, working off a screenplay by Seth Lochhead and David Farr, keeps the action pulsating at a high-pitched beat. But still, he is able to filter in scenes of touching character development for Hanna, especially when she meets a similarly aged girl on vacation in Morocco. In these quiet scenes, the movie fully forms into a solid tale of real people hunting (needing) something to complete their lives.

Much of the picture relies on Ronan’s acting, and thankfully she is one of the brightest young stars working in Hollywood today. She layers her performance with enough skill and humanity to make the teenage girl an actual teenage girl. Although she has the tools to kill anyone and everyone, Hanna, at her heart, is a little girl afraid of the world.

The style of the film could have been ultra-commercial, like so many spy movies nowadays. Instead, Wright, using his trademark creativity, offers an artistic flair to the proceedings. The look of the film matters as much as the plot and characters. The winter landscape of Hanna’s training is perfectly shot and reminded me of Fargo. The final showdown between Hanna and Marissa takes place at an eerie, broken-down amusement park. Setting in the movie is key.

For a movie that on paper feels a bit gimmicky (a teenage assassin?), Hanna proves to be a smart thrill ride and one of the best films of 2011.

John Soltes / Publisher

• Hanna

• 2011

• Directed by Joe Wright

• Written by Seth Lochhead and David Farr, based on Lochhead’s story

• Starring Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett and Eric Bana

• Running time: 111 minutes

• Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some sexual material and language

• Bubble score: 4 out of 4