Star: Eric Banna

Hanna delivers a great genre and a memorable core theme. Not least because it’s so unique. Having a child as the action hero — much less a super hotshot assassin survivalist type hero — is really quite rare, especially in a movie that’s otherwise quite mature.

I’m not so impressed with the actress, Saoirse Ronan, who has a face like Rosamund Pike. This is a movie that anyone could have pulled off equally or better than her, so it should be no surprise that Amazon Prime’s miniseries reboot of this concept is just as good.

Eric Banna, playing her father, is a class act, while also being a bit hollow or skin-deep, if that makes sense. Maybe it’s his fake accent that throws things off, and his lack of real combative coordination doesn’t help things.

Cate Blanchett is also strong in her role as the agency boss tracking them both down (having killed her mother long ago).

The first 25 minutes are excellently built, with continuing momentum until Hanna thinks she’s cunningly killed the woman who her father taught her to kill.

The pace changes very well, through her escape, to her meeting new people.

Various scenes in foreign languages lower the value of this movie until you have outstanding subtitles to translate it all.

The underage LGBT agenda is clear and quite distasteful for me at least.

Although it doesn’t completely die off, it certainly loses a lot of steam by around half way in, and becomes an inferior movie, focused more on suspense and agitation than cool action, with a lot of irritating background music and sound effects.

All drawbacks aside, I’m going to rate this movie Bang Average on the basis of its value early on, considering the last half hour was several levels below average and highly skippable, but the quality of the first half hour was several levels above average.

If the lead actress were significantly better cast that would have helped too, but you can’t please everyone. I’m sure some people thought she was great, but she’s no Jessica Alba (even though there’s a similar theme to Dark Angel here, with Hanna being a genetically enhanced super-soldier child). In fact she’s more like Greta Thunberg — she’s probably some influential person’s daughter or friend’s daughter and that’s only reason she got the job. Upon checking, her parents are indeed actors too, so they’re obviously keeping it all in the club in one way or another, to the detriment of the movie’s quality in the end.