Hanna
Director: Joe Wright
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett and Eric Bana
**
There is a touch of Luc Besson's Leon in this action thriller from the Atonement director Wright, although it's nowhere near as enthralling.
Sixteen-year-old Hanna (Ronan from The Lovely Bones) is raised in isolation and trained by Erik (Bana) to be a ruthless multilingual assassin.
When Hanna opts to leave their log cabin and enter the big, wide world, it forces papa to alert her enemies that the young assassin is at large.
Chief pursuer is the revenge-seeking CIA operative Marissa Wiegler, played by the always watchable Blanchett, who here seems to carry on where she left off in The Aviator, channelling Katharine Hepburn as she globetrots after the fleet-footed teenager.
There is not much in the way of plot, and the little narrative that there is preposterous and overblown - and also criminally relies on the internet for its reveal. When a storyline is this flat, the characters need to be all the more engaging and Hanna fails in this regard.
Only the holidaying family (headed by the marvellous actress Olivia Williams) in Morocco and Spain hold interest. Most of the other figures are too cartoonish, especially Tom Hollander's hired goon. On the plus side, the cinematography is excellent and some of the action sequences heart thumping, but more could be expected from a director as skilled as Wright.
