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Created May 01, 2011 12:10PM PST • Edited Mar 15, 2014 07:01PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Very Good 3.5

   Action thrillers come no more accomplished than Hanna, brilliant director Joe Wright’s latest and perhaps greatest film. Profiling a genetically-modified 16 year old girl who would put 24’s Jack Bauer to shame, Wright finds ample opportunity for his trademark bravura filmmaking along with a few wry LOLs.

   Bravo, so long as ultra-violence suits your fancy.

   Hanna is one part freak show – father-daughter killers we root for amidst a sea of immoral people viewed amorally; one part stunning travelogue. About the former, it’s often damn funny in a darkly humorous kind of way. About the latter, it’s full of astoundingly accomplished filmmaking: sights and sounds perfect as any film could hope to deliver.

   Lots to recommend it, only a cynically creepy screenplay, shallow cast and extreme violence to warn against. Supremely well constructed, it sets up as the beginning of a franchise.

   Think of it as Hanna 1: The Origin. Sequels are likely.

   You go girl! I will follow.

4. Acting

   Very Good 3.5

   Three Major Stars

   • Saoirse Ronan – yet to turn 18 with several major roles already in her iMDB Known For – delivers her best role yet as Hanna star Hanna, a veritable Hit Girl 2, stronger & older than the original. Sexually undeveloped, she’s ideal as a killer tomboy with long blond hair. With this role, Ronan becomes a Tough Girls sister-in-good-standing.
   • Eric Bana stolidly fills the thoughtful action hero role as her Father, in the style of Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer.
   • Cate Blanchett unctuously and unattractively – which is to say successfully – essays the savage Suit, smugly corrupt.

   A mixed bag of supporting players:

   • Jessica Barden pops off the screen as a bored teenie – snarky and protosexy. The girl’s got starlet power.
   • Olivia Williams & Jason Flemyng fail to impress as her Lefty parents.
   • Tom Hollander’s sniveling killer annoys as much as frightens.

   The rest fade into the copious production values.

5. Male Stars Very Good 3.5

6. Female Stars Great 4.0

   Saoirse Ronan is Really Great, Cate Blanchett is Very Good.

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars OK 2.5

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    Wow, what a great film. From the opening ice scene, a circular floe crinkling in a partly liquid lake, then a huge reindeer noisily foraging till Hanna puts an arrow through his rib cage, to the extreme modern paranoia in the later scene of a room attacking Hanna’s mind, to Bana striding through a German airport in an extraordinary extended tracking shot, this is filmmaking of the greatest distinction.

11. Direction Really Great 4.5

    Joe Wright became a name to remember with Atonement. He’s become a modern master with Hanna.

12. Play OK 2.5

    Brilliant, crisp, clever, yet cold, conniving, cynical. On balance, OK.

13. Music Perfect 5.0

    Pianissimo at times, with intimate sounds, silence, breathing, ice floes crinkling.

    Fortissimo other times, with house music throbbing, metal thrashing, everything pulsing.

14. Visuals Perfect 5.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 2.4

    Lots of blood. Be warned.

17. Sex Titillating 1.7

18. Violence Brutal 3.0

19. Rudeness Salty 2.5

21. Reality

    Supernatural 3.1

    Supernatural doesn’t require vampires or ghosts. To pick one example, it requires that Hanna pop up from a manhole onto the bottom of a Hummer rolling above at highway speed. No blood sucking involved, but still supernatural.

    Logistically, the players go from a forest “above the Arctic Circle” to Morocco to Germany largely without planes, luggage or money. Sure.

    Politically, the story presumes that the CIA routinely conducts Nazi-class war crimes. Come to think of it, that isn’t far from the Hollywood worldview. How they must be disappointed that their man Obama can no longer indulge in such Left Wing fantasy now that he’s in the White House.

22. Circumstantial Surreal 2.3

23. Biological Supernatural 3.5

24. Physical Supernatural 3.5