Between Chloe Moretz as Hit Girl in Kick-Ass and Saoirse Ronan in Hanna, a new Hollywood trend is dawning: Young girls are totally the new action stars. It’s a smart move. Over the last couple of decades, Hollywood has streamlined and refined masculine action stars to the point that they barely look human anymore. We expect them to do insane physical stunts from the moment they walk on-screen, whereas a girl in her early teens performing ridiculous combat moves and committing calculated murder in a split second still manages to confound our expectation. By remaking the action hero into a figure we normally associate with vulnerability, the whole genre feels fresh again. And whereas Moretz was doing a hilarious Clint Eastwood impersonation that was ginned up for the sake of parody, Ronan’s Hanna is a logical evolution from Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne; she’s as serious, and deadly, as a heart attack.
Hanna was raised in the arctic circle by her exiled superspy father (Eric Bana) to be a killing machine, a weapon in his war against an American intelligence agent (Cate Blanchett in an unfortunate, wobbly Southern accent). As the wily Hanna travels around Morocco and Europe, she murders enough anonymous government agents to fill a school bus, even though she’s never seen electric lights before. Ronan outacts every adult in the film; her Hanna is brutal and sly and innocent and lonely and brave and scared, all at the same time.
Luckily, Ronan’s performance is matched by vigorous and inventive direction. Nowhere on Joe Wright’s directorial résumé—The Soloist, Atonement—was there a clue that he could be this gifted at directing an action film. He understands we’ve seen the painstakingly choreographed fights a billion times before, so he gives us expressionistic action that makes the audience complicit in Hanna’s battles; while we do get to see her in action, we’re often asked to intuit the sequence of events from clues that Wright provides us. He cleans off all the familiar tools (the tracking shot, the shaky cam) and reenergizes an entire genre.
Hanna gets bogged down in fairy-tale imagery (if you’ve seen the trailer, you already saw the shot that features Blanchett walking out of the mouth of a tunnel shaped like the Big Bad Wolf; it’s no less subtle when placed in context) when a little restraint would have been ideal. But that’s a forgivable sin. Even the moments of heavy-handed symbolism feel spirited in the company of the exciting Chemical Brothers soundtrack. Nothing in Hanna is lazy or dumb; when compared to the last 10 years’ worth of action films, it feels like a goddamn revolution. 
It’s not a new direction for action, it’s a new self-help genre for single dads.
Note to self: buy daughter handgun.
Yet another example of how US fashion and entertainment trends trail Japan. Project A-ko was produced in 1986. I watched it in 1999. I remember thinking, “Wow, seeing a high school girl grab a giant robot by the ankles and throw it into an office building like a shotput is pretty impressive.”
Didn’t Kick-Ass bomb at the box office?
Hanna also looks to be shaping up as a bomb…
Ignorant Hollywood anglocentrism to say that: “Nothing in Hanna is lazy or dumb; when compared to the last 10 years’ worth of action films, it feels like a goddamn revolution”.
Hong Kong, Japan, Bangkok, Seoul, and now Johnny Nguyen working out of Vietnam continue to push the envelope of the action genre.
The U.S. is still playing catch up, having failed to utilize John Woo.
Damn. What a memorable movie! Went to see it, partially on the strength of your review, so thank you.
I’ve been trying to come up with a list of movies it reminded me of, films it evoked. There’s a bunch of them, including anything with ice or snow in it, especially “Rare Exports,” or anything with a powerful but attractive female character (“La Femme Nikita,” Priss in “Blade Runner”?), or anything with scenes of a person alone in a wilderness (and here they do the Moroccan desert as well as the Finnish sub-arctic). Or scenes of a “savage” dumped in a modern environment and trying to process our noisy and unfamiliar technology the first time. Even “Frankenstein,” hungry for friendship, but pursued by the townspeople with pitchforks and torches.
The film evokes too many, yet only momentarily. It’s really like nothing else at all. Despite what I thought might be intentional homages to other movies, it’s really unique. Awesome, really.
Even trying to stuff it into a genre is hard. The back-story premise is pure sci-fi, although none of the stereotypical trappings are here. I don’t know if we’ll see it show up on any of the sci-fi lists, though I hope it does.
Revolution would be Hanna as anything other than a Caucasian. Revolution would also be Cate Blanchette avoiding the “white woman falls while being chased” trope.
My, my, “Jerry M. Ander.” That was a succinct post. I’m curious: are you a self-loathing white person or a negro/black/african-american passing on the interwebs by posting with a white name?
I just saw this film and wasn’t as impressed. The action sequences reminded me of District 9 – jumpy and too fast, like watching a video game. But hyped-up action is what it takes these days to impress the video obsessed generation. I did like the vulnerability and innocence conveyed in Hanna – at least they didn’t go wrong there. I saw a lot of borrowing from previous films – like the staircase scene in “Run Lola Run” and, of course, the sequence where she escapes from the CIA (?) headquarters has a lot of similarity to “La Femme Nikita.” If you’ve watched a lot of films, you’ll know that this film isn’t very original in its execution. Its originality lies in the fact that they replaced the macho guy with a pre-pubescent girl.