Reuniting with the breakout starlet from ATONEMENT (2007), Joe Wrightinstalls a 16-year-old Saoirse Ronan in the forefront of fourth picture HANNA, which would spawn a spin-off TV series in 2019, our titular gal is reared and trained by her father Erik Heller (Bana) as a professional assassin, in the vast hinterland of northern Finland in complete solitude.
When she feels ready, deliberately bringing down the curtain on their existence incommunicado, Hanna awaits the advent of CIA's special forces, so that she can kill the target, Marissa Wiegler (Blanchett), a senior CIA officer, while Erik remains at large.
Apparently Marissa is a more cunning vixen than they think, who sends a decoy to meet Hanna, in the wake of the scuffle, Hanna escapes from the underground CIA base and fetches up in Morocco, then decides to head towards Berlin to meet with Erik, en route she befriends a vacationing British family traveling in a camper van, a nascent friendship with the similar age Sophie (Barden) germinates, much less fortunate for the Spanish boy Feliciano (Cervantes), who tries to seal a kiss with her.
Meantime, Marissa sends ruthless agent Isaacs (Hollander) and his henchmen to capture Hanna, while Erik's attempt to terminate Marissa himself is botched. Amid the onscreen cat-and-mouse game (inevitably, collateral damage befalls those who are in the know of Hanna's whereabouts), the backstory of Hanna's parentage is extruded in small doses, until a confrontation with Erik that strains the importance of the role of "biological father" when the pair's mere existence is dangerously on the line.
As an action-thriller hinges on a genetically engineered adolescent's “super-soldier” fighting expertise and instincts, an ethereal, svelte and eyebrow-dyed Ronan is evidently and physically not built to the task, the close-range combat sequences are rapidly constructed to hide her brawn-challenged skill and it is more liable to show her leaping and running in stead; Bana is more apt in the fighting mode (a nicely choreographed long take inside a German metro station is the centerpiece here), but as a second banana , only his brio seems to be deflated afterwards; as for Blanchett, totally shrouded in merciless menace, her Marissa resists any scintilla of humanity and sympathy.
Light on logics and mobile flair, what Wright compensates for is a keen attention on the atmospherics and visual expression, say, a decrepit German amusement park is devised with a Grimm tale ominousness for the climax, and the icing on the cake is the pulsating electronic rhythm purveyed by the Chemical Brothers, only in this dismal case, the cake itself is neither fish nor fowl.
referential entries: Wright's ATONEMENT (2007, 8.7/10); David Leitch's ATOMIC BLONDE (2017, 6.6/10)
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