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.
