Hanna

It's just over a year since a teenage girl with remarkable ass-kicking skillz blazed an expletive-laden trail across cinema screens and delivered a breath of fresh air to audiences bored of watching middle-aged men getting all the action. Thirteen months later, Kick-Ass's Hit Girl hands the baton to Hanna's Hanna, who stares at it blankly, fires an arrow through it then mumbles a nonsensical payoff line at it which nobody understands.

It's hard to see how Hanna wouldn't work: the story of a girl raised in the wilderness to be a ruthless assassin by Eric Bana (himself no slouch with the assassining stuff), then forced to go on the run, simultaneously hunting and hunted by hard-assed CIA bitch Cate Blanchett across continents, with some potentially devastating revelations about her own identity to discover along the way should be the perfect appetiser before the summer's main course of blockbusting action spectacugasms.

Unfortunately it's more like a fortune cookie: bland, hollow and with nothing useful or interesting to say. Saoirse Ronan can run and fight a bit, but her permanently expressionless chops never let us anywhere near her character; Eric Bana gets one spectacularly-shot and choreographed fight scene and not much else, while Cate Blanchett, one of the world's most overrated actors, is as unconvincing as her hair.

With Pride And Prejudice and Atonement director Joe Wright behind the camera you might expect some dramatic interplay or character depth, but instead you get a series of Chemical Brothers music videos linked by frustratingly unfulfilled scenes of potential interest (Hanna's sexual awakening is hinted at then forgotten about; the truth about her past is banal and irrelevant), a thread of incongruous comic relief from a British family in a motorhome, and the year's oddest casting in cuddly Tom Hollander as a sadistic hitman with an inexplicable wardrobe and neo-Nazi sidekicks.

Still, if it's a violent gore-fest you're after, Hanna is the film to see. Don't just take my word for it: the IMDb Parents' Guide tells you all you need to know.

Hit Girl must be shitting herself.

An Incomprehensible Robot And A Massive Hairdo

Now I’m not one of those people who says, “If I had a time machine I’d go back and do blah blah blah”. Having said that, if I had a time machine I’d go back and nail Shia LaBeouf’s doors and windows shut on the day he was meant to audition for Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, but that’s neither here nor there.

The thing about time travel is it’s a goldmine for telling great stories, as proven by the fact that even a load of slushy old chickery flickery like The Time Traveller’s Wife is surprisingly unterrible because Eric Bana’s lurches through time give it a cerebellum-exercising twist. In fact the films that focus on the effects and possibilities arising from time travel, rather than an FX-heavy display of how it happens, tend to be the better stories.

For, as they say, example: The Time Machine isn’t about time travel, it’s about where we’re going as a species. Back To The Future isn’t really about time travel, it’s about the unbridled horror of meeting your Mum as a teenager and having her drool all over you like a rabid mastiff. And The Terminator just uses time travel to kick start a relentless game of cat and mouse between an incomprehensible robot and a massive hairdo with a small woman underneath.

What’s great about these films is their inherent re-watchability. You simply have to see them more than once because the knowledge of how it all fits together only enhances an already mind-squootling experience. Now there are loads of cracking time travel movies that not enough people have seen, and it’s my duty and my honour to make you aware of a couple of them.

Primer

Just about the lowest-budget time travel movie ever (it cost $7,000), but it doesn’t matter because all the genius is in the story. Two mates build a time machine, try and use it to make a fast buck, but double-reverse-counter-cross each other all over the place until nobody knows where they live or what their name is. The mechanics of their time travelling are so labyrinthine that to explain it would be like turning your brain into spaghetti and noodles and then trying to work out which is which.

Los Cronocrimenes (Timecrimes)

Much less boggling than Primer; it will only turn your brain into spaghetti. One man has the most bonkers afternoon of his life when he spots a naked woman in the woods behind his house and - obviously - goes to investigate, a course of action which will leave him bloody, battered, and with various duplicates of himself mucking about in the space-time continuum causing all sorts of monkey business. One of The Incredible Suit’s best films of 2009.

And so, my duty done, I’m off to Hollywood in my DeLorean with a hammer, some nails and a map of the stars’ homes.

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