There are plenty of films about little girls whose circumstances and parenting options prevent them from being little girls for long – The Professional, Kick Ass and even Sucker Punch to some extent. Now that's how you shoot a bashing sequence! Hanna has the menace of A Clockwork Orange and the inevitable pathos of Nikita while providing another example of what we are doing to destroy ourselves and our future. We get vital spatial awareness thanks to wide shots held long enough to turn us into gob-smacked witnesses. Watch the unbridled fury in James Caan as Sonny as he gets increasingly carried away with bashing his brother-in-law. Another great example of a terrifically shot fight sequence is in Coppola's The Godfather. And once the audience blinks – the emotional build-up is halted. Hold a shot and you force the audience to watch. Look at the footage of the beating of Rodney King – shot by an amateur – but you can't go past it for emotion. The constant rush of mid shots and close-ups with fast cutting detracts from a truly emotive fight sequence. I love wonderfully choreographed hand-to-hand combat action sequences and there are quite a few in Hanna – but I long for the day directors will return to holding wider shots so we can actually see the fighting take place. Even the support cast and extras are homeless, baseless and nomadic like the leads. The loss of childhood innocence would be tragic if it even existed in the first place. Playgrounds are dangerous and decayed, snow is beautiful but unkind, daddies show they care by playing rough and demanding excellence and daughters murder then apologise for not doing it as well as they should have. The real success of this movie is director Joe Wright's ability to use every prop and every location in a highly provocative and meaningful way. But to me she looked like Julia Gillard on a ruthless rampage to restore order to a chaotic world surrounded by unreliably competent underlings. Cate Blanchett is a mother of sorts – mother to the subversive operation of destroying the father-daughter-killer-tag-team. Eric Bana plays her warm father who has the same concerns for his little girl as any dad – he wants her to be able to defend herself and survive in a world that's out to get her. But in Hanna she's not so much ethereal as she is lethal. Saoirse Ronan plays the lead role with a quiet intensity that echoes the character she played in Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones. She's a ruthlessly trained assassin by her secret agent dad and with a blonde disguise over her ginger genes, she easily passes for a modern day example of the Hitler Youth. Teenage girls can be quite a handful and Hanna is way more trouble than any other daughter could be because when she throws punches – people die. Forget the trouble you think you might have with a teenage daughter who smokes, drinks, swears and gets contraception from her friends in the playground then doesn't use it anyway.
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January 2023
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