Hanna

Hanna turned out to be a brilliant watch for many reasons. It was a funny, actions packed, looked great and had a pumping sound track by the Dust Brothers, now better known as the Chemical Brothers.

As the name suggests the story revolves around Hanna. A young girl raised in isolation who has been government trained to kill. Eric Banna plays the father, who turned rogue agent and escaped with her to save her from a life as a government assassin.

However, Hannah comes of age and wants to experience the world outside the woods for herself and a chain of events are set off that see Hannah travel round the globe trying to escape the clutches of head of programme, Cate Blanchett.

The acting is solid throughout from all of the 3 main cast members and the look Nd feel of the film is distinctly German and industrial. Chemical Brothers' sound track adds to the German feel of the film and the action comes thick and fast and handled brilliantly.

What was a real surprise though, was how well the rest of the film was handled though. Scenes of Hanna trying to make friends and make sense of the world outside that which she had known all her life was both touching, poignant and at times down right funny.

The parts of her travelling across Europe with experiencing everything life had to offer for the first time were handled with sensitivity and, I thought, real understanding. Yet at the same time, scenes of her kicking arse where brutal and unflinching.

Hanna was a thoroughly enjoyable film that ticked all boxes and I thought it was a very descent attempt at giving a familiar theme (The genetically modified killer) a slightly new twist.

Im so disappointed! This could have been so good.

It starts off fantastically; it's different to everything I've ever seen, it's fresh and exciting. I was literally buzzing with how good I thought this film was. There is a point where she gets on a chug boat on a canal in France, hoody up and she's off to Germany - at this point I was excited about how the film was about to get really going and building towards a great end.

However - and this is where the disappointment comes - the film dips somewhat from here. I find the children's fantasy play house and the Alton Towers theme a very poor section of the film. Then the clip of Hanna when she reunites with her "Dad" and finds out the truth about everything is far too short then the whole ending seems very rushed. It's as if the writers had a six month deadline and spent five months and twenty-five days on the story up to the boat on the canal scene, and then had five days to write the ending.

After how good the start and middle to this film was, I am immensely disappointed in how it ends. Could have been a great; but it isn't!

Six star start and middle; one star last third. :(

I've no idea why this film has had such poor reviews from some viewers or has turned out to be so polarising but it would appear to be one of those features which you either spectacularly love or loath.

I have to say I absolutely loved it. The plot is simple enough but while parallels can be drawn with the Bourne films' identity crisis motif it is a very different feature. Jason Bourne/David Webb was an adult who was engineered into some sort of super soldier by participating in a strange government behaviourist-psychological mind control experiment. Hanna is younger, ignorant of being a legacy of a similar project and living in the wilderness, there is no need to recover memories or resolve a crisis of identity. Instead the driving force in leaving the wilderness is a desire to experience life more fully and directly than what can be told from the sources available at hand to her and her mentor/watcher.

There are so many excellent themes in this film which are only partically touched upon due to time, pace and requirement to progress the plot onwards to its conclusion. They remain none the less excellent. For instance the interactions between Hanna as a socially isolated and consequently socially maladapted person with the precocious child of bohemian liberal parents. The scene where she is in awe of electric light and then overwhelmed by all the disturbing noise created by the TV, telephone, kettle and other mod cons in concert.

The villains are convincely evil, each one in their own way exemplifies as certain kind of sado-masochistic character, from the agency woman who brushes her teeth until they bleed, to the skin heads and malignantly perverse tracker killer (who with his retro track suit appearence and skin head cohorts has a sort of seventies or eighties villainy quality about him) who are employed to trail Hanna.

The acting is done well, the soundtrack and accompaniment is fantastic also, the Chemical Brothers really have provided the perfect sound for the dystopic near future the characters inhabit.

If you liked the Bourne films I would recommend this, I would recommend it as perhaps better infact than the Bourne movies (although the Bourne books were better than their film adaptations).