Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) is a teenager living in a remote cabin in the secluded Finnish forest with her father Erik Heller (Eric Bana). She spends most of her days doing ordinary kid things like training to become an assassin by hunting deer with bows and arrows, gutting said deer with her bare hands, engaging in hand to hand combat with her father, target practice with pistols, memorizing fake life stories, and learning about a dozen languages. Hanna has spent nearly her entire life living there, away from the real world and any sort of technology. The only real piece of technology she comes into contact is a radio transmitter which her father presents to her, explaining that once it is turned on, a CIA agent by the name of Marissa Weigler (Cate Blanchett) will learn of their location and come to find and kill her. He warns her to only flick it on when she feels ready to face the challenge.
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| Forget Barbies... Hanna enjoys gutting deer with her bare hands. |
Hanna finally decides she is ready, and flicks on the transmitter. Erik reluctantly agrees, suits up and leaves for Germany, knowing that Weigler will soon send a commando team to seize them. Hanna is captured later that night, and interrogated at a special facility in Morocco, where Hanna kills one of Weigler's body doubles and escapes. We learn that Erik Heller is a rogue CIA agent, and that that Erik has been training his daughter for all these years to murder Weigler. She hires a team of assassins to track her down and kill Hanna, who is now hitching a ride across Europe with the family of a girl she befriended. As the assassins bear down on her, Hanna will discover some unsettling truths about her family, her father and Weigler, as she finds out more about who she really is.
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| Cate Blanchett as a murderous CIA agent is some inspired casting. |
One of
Hanna's main strengths is the quality of the main cast. Saoirse Ronan is just fantastic as the deadly yet naive girl who is slowly discovering the world she's been sheltered from for all those years. Imagine Natalie Portman's Mathilda in
The Professional, but with an unhinged, savage edge. Hanna wasn't taught to be an assassin, she was born one. It's not an easy sell to make her character convincing, but she does a great job of it, and outshines every one else in the movie, even Cate Blanchett who I thought was surprisingly good in her unusual villainous role. The much advertised score by The Chemical Brothers is just fantastic as well, making scenes like Hanna's prison escape (an awesome scene, by the way) explode with urgency and tension.
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Theatrical release poster