Hanna

Beware genre films helmed by a prestige director. When filmmakers retool their style for the material, you get films like Tim Burton's Batman or the Coens' True Grit. More often a self-professed auteur thinks he's too good for a mere spy flick/horror film/superhero movie, injecting it instead with muddled "meaning" and irritating artistry. Witness John Frankenheimer's Prophecy passing off homicidal bear jerky as a profound ecological statement.

Joe Wright's Hanna (2011) is Exhibit B. What highfalutin nogginhead thought attaching the director of high-toned Oscar bait Pride and Prejudice and Atonement to a violent spy thriller was a good idea? The movie received modest acclaim but this blogger found it insufferable, a half-digested mixture of stomach-turning style, facile story and misused actors.

In the Finnish wilderness, teenager Hanna (Saorise Ronan) is raised by Erik Heller (Eric Bana) to be a self-reliant killing machine. Hanna's decision to see more of the outside world brings fateful consequences. CIA Agent Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett) knows Erik has damaging information on the agency and enlists freelance thug Isaacs (Tom Hollander) to kill him. But Hanna proves an even bigger threat, especially when she learns of her twisted origins.

Hanna contains all the careful, considered craftsmanship of a bad music video. Wright crams the film with circling camera angles, hard dissolves, dizzying colors, international locations (Morocco, Finland, Germany) and strange imagery (headless dinosaur statues, Isaacs' gauche nightclub) but it's all ostentatious, empty preening. Long, pointless scenes and annoying dialogue proliferate. Coupled with the Chemical Brothers' roiling techno-score, the overall effect is nausea.

The story is even worse. The "fairy tale structure" (informed I guess by Hanna reading a Brothers Grimm book) seems a convenient excuse for endless clichés, plot holes and one-note characters. Hanna's baffled by light switches and kitchen appliances yet quickly masters a laptop? Hanna skipping from continent to continent without notice or interference is equally hard to swallow. Similarly, the last-act revelations about CIA genetic experiments come out of a screenwriter's handbook.

Wright and writers David Farr and Seth Lockhead fail further handling Hanna. She's a blank slate lacking the self-awareness of Hit Girl or Katniss Everdeen's rounded characterization, all meaningful glances and fancy gun tricks without substance. Wright pointlessly adds a family of hippie tourists for cringe-worthy character non-development. Then again, even a better-realized character couldn't overcome the twee disconnect between Hanna's self-discovery and barehanded neck breaking.

Saorise Ronan struggles to wring any humanity from an ill-conceived part. Eric Bana is merely bland, but the bad guys are pathetic. Cate Blanchett mixes cartoon villainy with a laughable Texas drawl, while Tom Hollander sporting frost blond hair and a Hogan's Heroes accent is terrifying in the wrong way. And these are actors I ordinarily like.

Hanna is just a gloppy mess. Joe Wright's attempts to transcend the pulp story merely inspire incredulity. No matter how many close-ups of Cate Blanchett's bleeding gums you insert Joe, it's still a teenaged assassin flick.