Thursday, May 3, 2012

bad/awesome flixxx review: Hanna (2011)

"Kissing requires a total of 34 facial muscles, and 112 postural muscles. The most important muscle involved is the orbicularis oris muscle, because it is used to pucker the lips." - Hanna


"This is very, very difficult. But sometimes children are bad people, too." - Marissa


"Where do you come from?" - Hotel owner
"The forest." - Hanna


Talk about a badass flick.  I waited for a long time to see this.  I remember seeing the trailer and freaking out.  Sometimes- and I think it's very rare these days, but there will be a trailer- where dads everywhere look over at their sons and say, "we're there for that one!"  This was one of those.  AND even rarer is when the movie actually holds up to the excitement of the flick.  This was one of those as well.  A new comer, who I think is absolutely incredible in this, Saoirse Ronan, plays the lead role.  With Eric Bana and Kate Blanchett with a TERRIBLE fake accent, I give you HANNA.





This one starts out with a bang.  Actually an arrow shot.  Then a bang.  We come upon Hanna in the northern wilds of Finland near the end of her training and quite possibly her childhood.  She's been raised since she was two years old by her father Eric in the forest to be a perfect fighter/unkillable agent.  For what, she does not know.  We see multiple almost montage scenes of her and father training, learning to use hand to hand combat as well as weapons and wilderness survival techniques.  She apparently has never heard music, and is ignorant to modern technology.  She knows numerous languages and repeats verbatim long passages of encyclopedic knowledge.  She frequently reads from a blood stained Brother's Grimm children's fairy tale book.
At a certain point, she tells her father that she is ready, and that it is time.  he doesn't think so at first, but when she wakes up the next day, he has pulled out some sort of transmitter and begins to tell her that if she flips the switch, a female agent named Wigler will come and try to kill her and won't stop until one or the other is dead.  She has memorized over and over several portions of back story on who she is and where she's from and other pieces of a fictional life.  After some time mulling it over, she flips the switch.  When her father comes home, he packs his shit and tells her to meet him in Berlin.  She sits and waits for what is to come. Wigler sends agents to capture Eric, and in the process they find Hanna, who immediately kills a good number of them.  They finally overwhelm her and take her back to some government processing facility.  She asks to speak to Wigler and Wigler sends in a body double.  Then Hanna asks her a bunch of questions about how Wigler met her father, and Wigler is actually feeding the right answers to her through an ear piece.  Hanna begins crying and hugging the double who is a little freaked out, but before they can rescue her, she fucking kills the double and then shoots out all the cameras, and kills a bunch of agents before escaping out the fucking air ducts!!  Then she gives chase across Europe on her fucking mission to make it to Berlin to meet up with her dad.

Turns out she's in Morocco.  She meets up with this boy and girl after staying overnight in a hotel that had television that freaked her out, since she'd never seen one before.  The boy and girl's parents are British hippies on holiday and they are spitting to Spain, so Hanna stows away in their camper.  The little boy sees her, but he likes her, so he keeps mum.  They keep having adventures together, riding motorcycles with boys, and then almost kissing one, until her dad's "boyfriend repellant" programming becomes obvious.  Then Wigler who is giving chase hires this crooked whistling ex- agent who'll do really bad stuff that she can't do, and sends him and his goons after Hanna.  He really gets a scent for them and then meets up with the family and almost gets Hanna, but Hanna kills one of his droogies.  Then she has to split or be killed, but the bad guy - Isaacs calls in Wigler who interrogates the family.  None of them really even know shit, except for the little boy.  He tells them that he heard Hanna say she was going to Berlin.  DOOF!
So I don't wanna give away the ending to this one since its still SO new, and a lot of mafks haven't had a chance to see it. BUT seriously, if I could recommend a newer badass, fast paced, action type flick, with a couple twists and more than enough bang bang shoot em ups for your buck, I would say def check this one out.  The scenery is great, the soundtrack is creepy and bumpin, the idea of a girl that age who is totally clueless to the modern world is just an amazing concept in and of itself.  Check this one fo sho.  word.

2 comments:

  1. It's a class action film, and pretty original too. Interested to see where Ronan takes her career.

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  2. I liked the attention to detail and the odd characters. Its like Wes Anderson did an action movie. Oh and the steady-cam shot subway fight? Best ever.

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