Eye Candy #529 - "Hanna"

Hanna:  It is extremely difficult to combine art-house and thriller into a single film.   On one hand, you can be wildly self-indulgent artistically (shots that serve nothing but themselves) and on the other, you can abandon all attempts at intelligence so you can stage big explosions.  Directed by Joe Wright and distributed by art house Focus Features, “Hanna” treads the fine line between the two successfully.  Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) is a teenage girl living alone with her father (Eric Bana) in the wilderness near the Arctic Circle.  They have no contact with the outside world, hunt their own food, and practice hand-to-hand combat religiously.  She is also fluent in several languages and has never heard music before in her life.  Then, one day, with all her father’s training, Hanna decides “she’s ready”, activates a beacon, and various spooks coming running, led by Marissa Weigler (Cate Blanchett, sporting an almost cartoonish southern accent).  Apparently Hanna is a lot more than she appears to be and there are various government types gunning for her and her father, all while Hanna is out to revenge herself against the people who killed her mother, a journey which takes her from the Arctic Circle to Morocco, Hamburg, and Berlin.  Tom Hollander is here in support as a very idiosyncratic mercenary (he runs around with skinheads while wearing a white tennis suit, for starters), as well as Jason Flemying and Olivia Williams as two very new-age parents traveling with their children around Morocco in a caravan who befriend Hanna.  Violent without being gory, with some elements of black comedy thrown in as well, “Hanna“ is a fun ride.   Just a touch too long and sure, some of the camerawork is self-indulgent (Wright has a fondness for spinning the perspective around), and the script doesn’t resolve everything it sets up, but it  definitely keeps your attention and is entertaining.  The acting is solid, with Ronan as the stand-out here (she’s probably the best in her generation at picking scripts).  Woodchuck sez, “Check it out.”