Hanna (Joe Wright, 2011)

Hanna is either a high concept gimmick as an excuse for an action movie, or else an action movie as an excuse for Joe Wright to revel in high concept gimmickry. I'm not entirely sure which, but I suppose I would lean towards the latter. The action sequences are only intermittently interesting (most of the movie's midsection is relentlessly dull in this aspect), while the emotional cues are all infused with the kind of overwrought E-M-O-T-I-O-N that can only come from someone who sincerely believes he/she is saying something of great worth about the human condition. It stinks of Art, I guess you could say.

Unfortunately, that something he's saying about the human condition either isn't there, or is so poorly extracted from the material that the end result is the same. There's a heaviness of emotion and an attempt to examine the idea of growing up in seclusion and being thrust upon a strange, alien, oddly shaped world. But what does that say that isn't fairly obvious? If the message is that we shouldn't raise our kids in the wilderness and teach them nothing that doesn't come from a book, well, I would expect that by putting that message in a movie you are already preaching to converted. If it is an attempt to say something larger about the process of raising children and forcing yourself to let them grow up and experience the world, and Wright has chosen to tell this story via a fairytale action movie metaphor about a homicidal teenage girl, well this narrative concept has abstracted the idea to such a great length that it no longer has any real-world relevance. Wright attempts to fill this void of meaning with a highly touted Chemical Brothers score mixed way, way into the forefront, as if the throbbing electronic beats can somehow pound the poignance into you. The highly stylized camerawork is similarly overbearing and insistent, assaulting the viewer's eyes with visual cliches at a rapid-fire clip (a sun-dappled Hanna hangs her head out a car window, hair blowing slowly and wonderously in the wind; Bana dispatches a group of assailants in a whirling Scorsese meets Oldboy single-take set piece).

Worse, like Kick-Ass, it never makes any attempts to address Bana's systematic destruction of a girl's childhood for the sake of a mostly-empty vendetta. While it does a better job than that movie about questioning his tactics, it never once questions his motives. The audience is expected to take it as a given that if Bana had tried to raise her in a normal life somewhere, anywhere, in the world, that the all-encompassing arms of the CIA would eventually find them and kill them. This seems a very curious leap to ask, and is far less plausible than the idea that Bana's character is simply a psychopath. And, going further down the rabbit hole, the audience is never asked to reflect upon Hanna's path of destruction, which results in the deaths of numerous military and government personnel, but also a fairly large number of civilians. While she is not directly responsible for the latter deaths, it is somewhat difficult not to hold it against her, especially in moments where she fights a few guys, then proceeds to run away, leaving her innocent benefactors to whatever fate they're destined for. This seems weird, especially since it runs against the only idea Wright semi-coherently manages to state over Hanna's inflated 113 minute running time -- that, despite whatever we may convince ourselves, empathy does come more naturally than not-empathy, and there is a short little window from the time we are self-involved children to the time we are self-involved adults when we don't know how to not be empathetic. I don't know that I'm 100% on board with this idea, yet it's fairly clearly there -- only to be shaken apart by aforementioned Hanna totally manhandling the hell out of some dudes then inexplicably running away.

Also, can we all just acknowledge that Cate Blanchett is an awful impersonation of an actor at this point? She's like the world's most serious little kid playing dress up -- throwing on all kinds of wigs and accents and somehow making that whimsical idea an exercise in joyless austerity. Regardless of project, her acting tone always consists of the same theatrical demand for recognition. You're not gonna get an Oscar nomination for this one, I'm afraid, so can we please just stop pretending you're performing brain surgery on the Dalai Lama.

Now that I'm finally caught up on these, I'm going to try to start writing longer(-winded) pieces that deal with more specifics than I've previously been doing. I think it's good exercise to mix in both the thematic overview and the more surface-level examination, plus I'll only have to write one or two a day so I think I can then pour all the words I would've written on 3-5 of these trying to catch up into one movie I've seen recently and remember well enough to write more specifically about!