Quick Review: Hanna

You haven't seen many movie posts from me recently. That's because various circumstances have resulted in my seeing just one movie in the last 2 1/2 weeks. There are a few I definitely want to see, a few I might see, and others that there's no chance in hell of my seeing. I hope I'll get to see some of them in the coming days. In the meantime, that one movie I did get to see was "Hanna," the story of a 16-year-old girl (Saoirse Ronan) who's a killing machine, trained by her father, Erik (Eric Bana). They live in hiding in a cabin in the wilderness in Finland, she's had no contact with the outside world, and one day she tells her father she's "ready." She flips a switch on a transmitter which sends a signal to a CIA agent, Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), who sends a team to the cabin. They find Hanna, left alone by Erik. Hanna has been trained to kill Wiegler to avenge her mother's murder. Things get interesting from there as Hanna escapes, determined to make it to Berlin, where her father is supposed to meet her. The movie explores Erik's actions in this affair as well as Hanna's reactions to being out in the world, meeting other people and encountering things she's never seen, such as television. It's an unconventional-looking and -sounding film that picks up the pace quickly once Hanna is taken into custody. Ronan is very effective, but Blanchett was hamming it up too much. She was acting like it was just another schlocky run-of-the-mill action movie, but "Hanna" isn't that film. My grade: B.