Hanna

"Run little piggy"

Joe Wright's endlessly stylish cat-and-mouse film is a wonderful move away from the period dramas people may associate him with (how many people actually saw The Soloist after all?).  His visually appealing take does justice to Seth Lochhead and David Farr's location-packed script, the emphasis always falling on where Hanna is which greatly influences who she is.

Hanna is an assassin - and a young one at that.  Her whole life has been a training camp in which her father instills the rules she must follow to stay alive, "You must always be ready. Even when you're sleeping", but not the skills she needs when she finally comes up against that unknown quantity - other people.
Saoirse Ronan handles the difficult leading role of the youthful assassin with aplomb.  It is a very physical role without much scripted opportunity to show the inner workings of the child, yet she brings real heart to the character and her new, confusing, experiences with civilisation are played with just the right amount of awkwardness and curiosity.
The plot is drip-fed to the audience.  We're kept in the dark about the reason for the hunt for quite some time and even then new information hijacks us along the way.  In fact it appears that we are discovering things at about the same rate as Hanna herself, who remains in the dark about important plot points almost until the bitter end.

Eric Bana is very good as the father who has chosen to raise his daughter very much to his own design; in such a way as to make it impossible for her to make an informed decision about her life's direction.  It may seem strange and would make his character difficult to sympathise with were it not for the warmth with which he plays it.  Cate Blanchett is rather a weak link with a drifting accent and a slightly-too-driven character to get to grips with when we are told so little about her (what is her obsession with her teeth all about?).  However, I do wonder if the accent shifts are a character decision as she appears to get more Southern as she tries to come across as warm and caring.
The real star of the show is Tom Hollander's wearer of short-shorts extraordinaire, Isaacs.  Equal parts camp and creepy he edges ever closer to his prey with ever more well-contained joy.  It is yet another utterly brilliant performance to add to Hollander's seemingly never-ending list of extraordinary characters.  Yep, I love that guy.

Really though, Hanna is a film in which the style, production design and score (a brilliant piece of work by the Chemical Brothers consisting of pounding beats and haunting nursery rhymes) carry much of the weight.  Wright uses locations brilliantly, moving from snow to desert, populated urban areas to abandoned, overgrown sites with ease.  And this movement allows us to see the characters at their most comfortable and completely out of their depth which only allows us to understand them better.  As Hannah graduates from life with her father to the harsh landscapes of the compound and the desert, and then to the (much more dangerous) locales of urban life, we see that Wright is even more adept at pulling together different visual styles than his heroine is at adapting to the new constraints and information in her life.

Stylish with some very interesting performances - all underscored excellently by The Chemical Brothers - 8/10