Hanna is a slick, cool little action film that was failed (in my opinion) by its confusing plot and the never-explained motives of its villains and heroes.
*Spoilers ahead!*
Hanna opens with the titular character, a teenager played excellently by Saoirse Ronan (aka, the creepy little brat from Atonement), hunting down a deer in what appears to be either Siberia or the Arctic Circle. As she finishes killing the deer, a man comes up behind her with a gun and says, "You're dead". Hanna turns and begins fighting him with the skills of a trained assassin. Turns out, the man is Hanna's father and she is a trained assassin. She's a 16 year old killing machine who can also speak about 10 different languages. Her father, Erik (played by Eric Bana), has been preparing her for some eventual confrontation with some bad guys. But this is all the audience knows.
After Hanna and her father make their whereabouts known via a transmitter, Erik escapes and Hanna is captured and taken into holding. We find out that Erik is an ex-CIA operative who supposedly went rogue and is very dangerous--at least according to one Marissa Ziegler (played by Cate Blanchett). When Hanna asks to speak to Ziegler during her interrogation, they send in a lookalike, whom Hanna swiftly kills. She then escapes the underground lair where she's being held, only to find herself in the middle of the Moroccan desert with only the orange prison jumpsuit on her back.
Hanna hitches a ride with a Bohemian-to-the-point-of-parody British family on vacation and makes her way to Germany to meet her father in a fairy tale-themed amusement park. During her journey, we get a little of Hanna's back story. [Serious spoilers ahead] Apparently, Hanna was part of a medical experiment to alter babies' DNA to make them smarter, faster, and stronger: the perfect soldiers and assassins. Hanna's mother was going to abort her but was recruited at the last minute to participate in the experiment. Hanna's father fell in love with the woman (I think? It's never fully explained) and tried to help her flee to safety when they shut down the experiment. Ziegler chased down Hanna and her family, attempting to kill them all and succeeding only in killing Hanna's mother. Since that day, Hanna's dad lived in exile, raising and training Hanna for the day when Ziegler would hunt them down.
Do you feel a little confused? I sure did. Unless I missed multiple conversations or flashbacks, so many things are unexplained:
1) Who or what was behind the baby DNA experiment? What was the purpose of the experiment?
2) How was Ziegler involved?
3) What is the relationship between Erik and Hanna's birth mother? Were they in love? Was he just protective of her?
4) Why was Ziegler trying to kill Hanna and her family? Did the CIA plan to kill all the babies and families involved in the medical experiment? Why?
5) Why was Erik so intent on raising Hanna as his daughter?
6) Why didn't he plan to just hide forever--why did he and Hanna allow themselves to be found?
7) What happened to the British family in the end? What purpose do they serve other than giving Hanna a taste of friendship and love outside or her relationship with her dad?
8) What is Ziegler's back story? Why is she so evil?
and finally,
9) What is the purpose of this movie? Seriously. Is it just supposed to be a dumb action flick? Is it a commentary on medical experimentation? A modern-day fairy tale (Hanna has a book of Grimm's stories and Hanna and her father plan to meet at the fairy tale amusement park. I assume the integration of fairy tales into the plot wasn't an accident)? Is it a condemnation of the CIA? The American military-industrial complex? Foreign relations? America itself? Is it a feminist film? An anti-feminist film? A "feral child" film, like Nell?
As you can see, Hanna is one big sieve, with plot holes, unexplained motives, and characters with no back stories. Some action films have plots that are so convoluted, you can't follow them at all. Hanna wasn't remotely difficult to follow because there was so little too follow. I kept waiting for some big reveal, where Ziegler would explain herself to Hanna, but that moment never came.
Even though Hanna is a cool, slick action film, it was a major disappointment and tease. And I have no idea if the director intended for it to be that way.
3 out of 5 stars (mostly for cool action sequences and an awesome soundtrack)
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