There has been a trend in Hollywood of late to make action movies with a female lead: Salt, Sucker Punch, Kick-Ass, Columbiana, The Hunger Games, Underworld, Resident Evil, Haywire, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Some of these movies are clearly better than others. I never thought I would put Sucker Punch in the same sentence as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but look I just did it twice. Hanna is one of the better of the bunch. I don't really have much to say about it other than that it answers the question "What if Jason Bourne was a 16 year old girl?" This may not sound like high praise, but it is; the Bourne movies are excellent action movies, some of the best of the last decade and Hanna is of equal quality. All I'm saying is that the two characters are in essentially the same position: they don't know much about their personal history and they try to find the answers by fighting the CIA, mostly in Europe. The performance of Saorise Honan as Hanna is superb, especially given her relative lack of experience (this is only her second major role in a wide release movie, after The Lovely Bones, and her first action role). The other main actors are less impressive. Eric Bana, who plays Hanna's father and ex-CIA agent, is a non-entity for most of the movie, and Cate Blanchett's CIA agent in charge of bringing both Hanna and her father down is one dimensional and slips in and out of a southern accent. The choreography of the fight scenes is impressive, the locations where they filmed are lend an added depth to the content of the scenes (especially an abandoned amusement park towards the end of the film), and a soundtrack full of european techno music feels strange but adequately enforces the tension and ferocity of the film. A poignant callback to the beginning of the film makes for an ending to this movie that is the cherry on top. Still, at the end of the day, Jason Bourne did it first.
Trailer and rating after the jump.
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| Can YOU tell them apart? |
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