What's the world coming to?  2 positive reviews from me in 2 weeks...Wow!

I really, really liked this movie...almost in every way.  The cinematography is beautiful.  The sets are gorgeous.  The acting all top notch, although the always dependable Cate Blanchet was a little over the top at times, and just not quite right at others.  The action/choreography/stunts were excellent.  The soundtrack was amazing...and quite unique. and the story worked for me all the way.

I can see where some will say it's cliche, predictable, dull/slow at times, cheesy, whatever.  And, maybe it is all those, but as I always say, and even a quote from the movie itself, "the devil is always in the details", and the details here take us on a wild ride, full of fairytale-like sets, crazy, but lovable characters, and an emotional ride that completely sets itself apart from others like it.

As I said about Limitless, I bet this script was written to be an R rated movie.  It really shows and I'm actually quite shocked it got released with a PG 13 rating, as it's very violent, even brutal, bloody, with a cold heart at its core, and, it even has the word "fuck".  It comes off like an R rated flick in every way, though, and IMO, is not a movie for kids under the age of 15 or 16.

Totally worked for me on all levels.  Hidden within its simple story were a host of themes that all played out very nicely.  Absolutely excellent performance by young Saoirse Ronan in every way.  She made her deadly assassin character, Hannah not only believable in her fighting and killing prowess, but also in her naivety, innocence, and curiosity.

Go in with an open mind, and I doubt you'll leave unhappy.

I'm looking forward to checking this out.
I grabbed the soundtrack by The Chemical Brothers, really good stuff.
I was intrigued by the fairy tale lullaby ambiance mixed with pulsing industrial tropes.
The score suggests it's a La Femme Nikita in a fairy tale type setting.
All intriguing stuff, thanks for the review.

E.D.

I had never heard of the Chemical Brothers and I am definitely not into that form of music, but I really do like it here.

There's a great little tune playing during one of the final chase scenes, through a big truck/crate yard that works marvelously.

Quoted from Dreamscale I had never heard of the Chemical Brothers and I am definitely not into that form of music, but I really do like it here. There's a great little tune playing during one of the final chase scenes, through a big truck/crate yard that works marvelously.

I'm not into the Chemical Brothers either.
However, I do enjoy their score for "Fight Club".

I think the track you are referring to from he "Hanna" OST is "Container Park".
It's one of the highlights of the score, playful and dynamic.

E.D.

Yep, that sounds about right.  I couldn't think what those damn things were called, but "container" seems to be the right word.

I didn't know they did Fight Club.

Did you know they did several tracks for Black Swan?

I hate to disagree with you Dreamscale, but I was one of those people who thought this movie was boring, cliched, predictable, etc etc. However I can see why you (and so many others) enjoyed it. I really wanted to like Hanna, but the longer I watched it, the more tiresome it became. My problem with Hanna is that it just didnt bring anything new to the table. We've seen all of this before from the storyline to the setting. I really enjoyed the fairy tale setting at the end and the fight scene in the subway was bad ass. But besides that, I found the whole experience mediocre. I enjoyed the artsy camera work, and wished there was more. But I left the theatre feeling dissatisfied and disappointed.

With the exception of Hit Girl (which was played for laughs), I never gave into the whole "young kid killing machine" concept. and one thing that really pissed me off about hanna was that the military guards were dumb as shit. this bothers me in a lot of films. its the god damn military. theyre trained to follow basic procedures and think on their toes. although some would classify them as mindless drones, theyre not stupid. a character can evade these soldiers, but they have to be REALLY clever and very quick. my grandmother could have escaped from the military personnel in hanna...and she's in a hospital bed hooked up to an IV

Quoted from Dreamscale Yep, that sounds about right.  I couldn't think what those damn things were called, but "container" seems to be the right word. I didn't know they did Fight Club. Did you know they did several tracks for Black Swan?

Wow, I had no idea the Chemical Brothers did tracks for the film.
All I have is the Clint Mansel score. Hmm, better go hunt for that, thanks!

E.D.

I sorta swerved back and forth between Dreamscale and albinopenguin's respective opinions during the film.

The simple fact of the matter is, for me the script was a mess.  A mess of mostly good things, but a mess nonetheless.  When it started, I wanted it to slow down.  Once I realized why it had gone fast in the first act, I wished they had gotten to the second act faster.  Once they were into the second act, where the bulk of the interesting drama is -- and where the thriller element is significantly downplayed -- I wished that they would slow down because that's where the most interesting stuff was.  The beauty of this movie was in seeing Hanna adapt to the real world, and when it was working, it was really working.  Joe Wright is a great director and all of the stuff where Hanna is with the family was just absolutely brilliant.  The tent scene between Hanna and the other girl used a technique I've never seen before that I thought was just absolutely awesome.

But then it's back into thriller mode for the third act and it's just not handled well at all.  People run back and forth and here and there -- all of it looking great, as again, Wright is a great director -- and just don't really seem like they're doing the right thing.  Hanna's climactic argument with her father seems entirely perfunctory and doesn't last nearly long enough, and then the end just kinda didn't hit without that scene earlier succeeding.  

Oddly enough, Cate Blanchett is the weakest part of the cast, as Dreamscale mentioned.  Very, very strange to see.

On an inspiring side note, Hanna was written on spec by a graduate of my film school.  He finished Hanna in school and then just spent a couple years after school sending out hundreds of query letters.  No difference between him and us!  

While I enjoyed this film, it was very forgettable. Good action sequences, a thumping soundtrack and a good performance from Ronan lifted what was an otherwise sub average flick to enjoyable.

The story lacked any cohesion as a whole.

Some pieces of action verged on the ridiculous, namely Hanna leaping from a manhole onto the underside of a Hummer, her head and arms would have been torn off! The car crashes into a tree and hapless Cate doesn't spot them running from the car across the field? Really? I didn't buy it.

The imagery worked well in this. At one point Hanna was alone in an arid desert and the next shot was her father alone swimming in the sea. Symbolic and effective. The opening and closing images paired up nicely too. Hanna stalking a deer, then being hunted by the wolf, Marissa (she literally comes out of a wolf mouthed rollercoaster).

I'd recommend watching it. The good out weighs the bad.

Haven't watch this yet, but this movie was scribed by Seth Lochhead who went to Vancouver Film School a couple of years before I went.

Shows that you can break into the industry. It's good incentive for me.

I agree with Heretic that the script was a mess.  It jumps all over the place; and while sometimes  jumping back and forth is okay... it's not if it confused the viewer.

I was finally able to follow along, but they didn't explain a lot of stuff that seemed to be important to the story.

The action was good, but the movie was predictable and while the end completed the film full circle for what is was, it was nothing new.  

I'm seeing a lot of kid-killing machine type movies coming out now after the success of Kick-Ass, and that's a bit scary.  Hit Girl was played for shock, awe and laughs, but my fear was and is we may now see a whole bunch of films with this type of character.  

Ronan was good in her role, but the character I didn't really like.

"Hanna" is a frustratingly mixed bag for me.
The movie felt like an uneasy mix of La Femme Nikita and D.A.R.Y.L.
I'm into the marriage of fractured fairy tales and genetically enhanced assassins.
As if Hanna herself only brushes past actual fairy tale family existence.
Eric Bana trains her in idyllic settings, it's a nice contrast.
It set a solid tone for me and I was eager to see where the film would take it.

I think the shooting script's big mistake is not tying the B and C story into the theme.
Everything in the film should be a fractured family/fairy tale motif.
And a lot of the A story is, which is the most interesting part of the journey for me.
Looking through mirrors, strange lands and tastes, it's all rather clever.

But what makes Hanna special has no follow through in the supporting story.
Eric Bana's only flaw is not being Hanna's biological father, big whoop.
It plays out poor and truncated when they have their emotional wrap up.
Bana should've been like a son to Blanchett, she trained him, etc.
We needed that twisted extended family theme to be used more.
He was too weak to face his "mother", so he stole her "prize child".
And when they fled, Grandma Cate made her "daughter" pay the price.
Now that's a family flaw I can get behind and sympathize with Hanna's rage.
And it gives emotional motivation to Blanchett's character, which she really needs.
She wants her government funded daughter back in the federal fold.
These emotional ties would go a long way to explain irrational behavior too.

I think Hanna's time with the travelling family is tad too benign and pat.
It's a wasted opportunity to not tie Olivia Williams' character into the theme.
There should be something about her that reminds Hanna of her real mother.
And Hanna should resist the intimacy and struggle with role models.
Why is there only one of Hanna? Doesn't she have "experiment sisters"?
Now there's a way to throw gasoline on the fractured fairy tale family fire.
Give Hanna a real sister, raised by Blanchett, now it's hyper reality personal!
Play out the final conflict between the products of "single parents".

Still, as it stands, it's a pretty good ride.
And I commend Joe Wright for steering away from period dramas.
He's not ready to direct a Bond picture, but he didn't embarrass himself either.
The performances work, save for Blanchett's muddled character. It's not her fault.

I enjoyed the Chemical Brothers soundtrack.
I actually listened to it prior to seeing the movie.
In my mind's eye, all the lullaby type music was from the beginning.
I could see Hanna being raised in the woods and I was intrigued just by that.
But what we got was going right into the training scenes, a missed chance there.
I would've liked to see a younger unspoiled Hanna lost in the wood.
Eric Bana finds her and saves her, a microcosm for her entire life.
Bam, right there in the opener, give it to us through that fairy tale filter.

All in all, it's worth the time, but it's diminishing returns the further along I got.

E.D.

I found it a convoluted and ultimately boring mess.

In the end it just seemed to be people running about for no particular reason. Almost felt like the whole film was based on a 40 minute story and they just kept padding and padding to eke out the time.

Amazing sets and top notch cinemtaography. Blanchett was a bit out of sorts but the rest of the cast were good.

Major misfire for me. Wanted it to end as fast as possible.

The fairy tale stuff was interesting in an AI kind of way, but quite what the point of all the CIA nonsense was about is beyond me. Not a single thread of it makes sense.

It's one of the most stupid films I've ever seen.

I thought this was extremely weak and overrated. A lot of people have already commented on the cliches and predictability so I won't harp on those elements. I will however say that the film failed to deliver on its primary selling points. I'm pretty sure most audiences saw this for the action and not the plot and I have to say the action was utterly sterile and uber-choreographed. No intensity to be found in it at all. The scene with Eric Bana and the bad guys in the parking lot felt particularly staged and by the numbers. The fairy tale sets were different but not in a good way. Just jarring and weird. The cinematography and editing were frenetic and overly stylized. The soundtrack was awful. Unlike Fight Club, it was just full blown, one dimensional techno pounding.

The whole thing was really just noisy and irritating with surprisingly little worthwhile. As much as I enjoyed Leon the Professional, the Luc Besson formula produces some of the most phoned in films around that can't even deliver on their promises of high octane action. Emulators like Hanna do it no service by throwing in extra noise and crazy visuals. If you can't pull off a fight scene that doesn't look like it was rehearsed a million times, you should just throw in the towel.

Extremely disappointed.

It's a very odd film.

I get the same feeling from it that I do when I read some pro-pro scripts...the sensation that I'm not really sure what the film is trying to be.

It didn't make sense on any level.

The best of the film, as Chris said, was the coming of age type story...the DARYL/AI type thing.

The problem is it's built from a fundamentally flawed position. You have a girl being specifically trained to combat high level CIA operatives, yet she's never been exposed to any kind of technology. How can she be realistically expected to compete against agents if she gets frightened by a kettle? It makes absolutely no sense.

It's purely a plot device to allow them to have her innocent and go on a journey of self discovery...but if that's the story they wanted to tell, why did they mix it with the CIA stuff? It seems completely incompatible.

She's left by her father to be found by the agents, why? Was it to get her closer to the woman? If so, why does she then go on the run?

At the end she says "I just missed your heart" to Blanchett. It seems like this was a line intended to reveal a subtext that she wanted to be loved by the Blanchett character, but this through line never appeared in the film. I think this is a point that Brett raises above. Seems like they missed a large part of the intended story.

Definitely feels like it's a mix of several drafts, none of which make sense.

It's the same with her desire not to hurt anyone and return to innocence...that thread would make more sense if she wasn't so innocent in the beginning...that her "father" had raised her to be a heartless brutal killer (Kind of the Iron Giant story, I suppose) but she always seems quite empathetic.

Maybe there's an interesting story to be told about a move from innocence, through experience, back to an innoncent state...a kind of Zen type affair, but that's not what this story is about.

The thriller stuff doesn't work because it's too choreographed, and again it seems pointless. Why did she press the button? Why did they not just live out their lives in anonymity somewhere else in the world?

Presumably it's because Bana was raising her purely for revenge, but that point disappears at some point.

The film seems to contradict itself in every scene. Eric Bana when deciding to go to Berlin cuts his hair and shaves so that he appears exactly as he used to do in his CIA days...how odd.

Hannah is scared by a kettle but then knows exactly what Google is and how to use it to research DNA.

The CIA abolish the super soldier program at exactly the point it's finally been a success...why? Then Blanchett goes on a solo mission to eradicate the survivors for no apparent reason. She's acting outside of official lines, but it's never explained what her motivation is. If it's because she wants Hannah for the sake of her genes, why is she so willing to risk her life in a car crash and then by shooting her? If it's just that she wants her dead, what was the motivation and why did she then say she didn't want to hurt her at the end and not just shoot her from within the confines of the crocodiles mouth?

The shooting script is an absolute mess.

Ha! Just shows how subjective an art this is. I caught this over the weekend, and actually really enjoyed it. I liked the mix of fairytale and spy thriller, which I'd never seen before, and although it doesn't really work as a straight action CIA film, I'll excuse it as I think it's an interesting mash-up in its own right.

It was all a bit silly at times, but it had a slightly other-worldly quality that I just found quite engaging. I also found it genuinely amusing at times - the moment where Hanna's got that Spanish guy in the headlock and she says, "Should I let him go?" and her friend replies, "As opposed to what?! Yes!" is, I think a funny one. Always nice to have a sprinkling of lightness. Also, given who was involved, I was bound to enjoy it - Joe Wright is a director I rank very highly (I was looking out for his trademark long tracking shot, and when it came it didn't disappoint), and I'd probably watch Olivia Williams and Tom Hollander just walking down the street. So yeah, it gets a thumbs up from me. But equally, I can totally see why some people were completely turned off by it. A film that provokes opinions, this one. Which is possibly a strength in itself?

Quoted from Scar Tissue Films At the end she says "I just missed your heart" to Blanchett. It seems like this was a line intended to reveal a subtext that she wanted to be loved by the Blanchett character, but this through line never appeared in the film. I think this is a point that Brett raises above. Seems like they missed a large part of the intended story.

I thought that was literally just a reference back to when she shot the reindeer with the bow and arrow at the start? That's what she said to it as she pulled the arrow out. A symmetrical language thing, I thought. As well as saying that, in the end, she did what she was trained to do - kill, whether it's an animal or a person. Given how good she is at most other stuff, I'm surprised she's got a 100% fail rate at heart-hiting, though.

It seems pretty obvious to me that a number of people here want this (as well as other or all movies) to be exactly what they want it to be...and that just ain't ever gonna happen.

There are scripts and movies that are downright "bad", and when that's the case, I agree attack away, ask questions about ridiculous plot points, complete lapses in logic, etc.  But, this isn't one of those cases.  In no way, whether you didn't like it or hated it, is this a piss poor effort.

You may not be the intended audience, but the movie was far from a failure, financially and critically, with many people calling it one of the best films of the year.  And don't get me wrong, financial success does not equate to critical or technical success, but all things considered, I just don't see how anyone could bash this movie, as there are so many things going for it.

Look at the info available - 71% Tomato rating, $65 Million WW BO on a $30 Million budget.

If it wasn't for you, that's cool, but to say it's a terrible flick is like me saying The King's Speech was a piece of crap - I may think that, as it's definitely not a movie for me, but I'm not going to publicly attack it, because it doesn't deserve attacking - it was a huge success and appealed to a certain audience - I'm just not part of that audience.

C'mon Jeff.

It makes no sense. It's completely stupid.

You're the first to slate films for being illogical when you don't enjoy them, but just because you enjoyed it seems to mean you ignore all the problems with it.

If you look at the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, even many of the critics who rated it call it a substandard story or say it's flawed.

For some of them the style of the film and the central performance made up for it...but nothing can ever fix a broken story for me. Stlyish directing just emphasizes the problems, not disguises them, as far as I'm concerned. It makes you feel aware that they're making something poor and throw everything at it to try and hide it.

Quoted from Scar Tissue Films C'mon Jeff. It makes no sense. It's completely stupid. You're the first to slate films for being illogical when you don't enjoy them, but just because you enjoyed it seems to mean you ignore all the problems with it.

True, Rick...very true.  But you should also know that a deep story or theme means nothing to e in a movie - it's the entertainment factor that I'm always after.

I can't agree that it made no sense or is stupid.  It's a mid (big) budget action flick, so there are going to be a number of tings that don't make complete sense or may come off as illogical if you want to really look closely.

I totally enjoyed it, and I think I can say I totally enjoyed everything about it.  Cinematography is big for me - the look and feel of a film.  Production values are HUGE for me.  And, I always appreciate the little things that differentiate a movie from the pack, and there were so many on display here.

Hey, trust me, to each his own and I more than understand that.  My point is that whether you personally liked this or not, I just don't see how you can trash it.

Quoted from Dreamscale True, Rick...very true.  But you should also know that a deep story or theme means nothing to e in a movie - it's the entertainment factor that I'm always after. I can't agree that it made no sense or is stupid.  It's a mid (big) budget action flick, so there are going to be a number of tings that don't make complete sense or may come off as illogical if you want to really look closely. I totally enjoyed it, and I think I can say I totally enjoyed everything about it.  Cinematography is big for me - the look and feel of a film.  Production values are HUGE for me.  And, I always appreciate the little things that differentiate a movie from the pack, and there were so many on display here. Hey, trust me, to each his own and I more than understand that.  My point is that whether you personally liked this or not, I just don't see how you can trash it.

From my perspective, I don't know how anyone can really like it! Hannah herself was good and the parts she spent with the family worked. That's as far as I can go.

If a film is entertaining me, I can overlook numeorus flaws, when I start to get bored, I look for the reasons the film isn't working.

I've listed a few complaints I had, and there were far more, from a story point of view. You can try and refute them, if you can be bothered!

The biggest killer for me though was that it was boring. I felt no tension, or any uncertainty that she would win. There were no stakes that I cared about (she chose to fight in this bizarre way by pressing the button) and the action sequences were all dull and by the numbers.

The opening action scene was good, when she took out all the trained soldiers...but the ones after against average german henchmen were very dull. She has the physical strength to grab a hummer moving at 50 miles per hour, but can't easily overcome a random thug....inconsistencies like that are rife throughout.

But that's the weird thing about films. They effect people differently.