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Hanna

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, and Cate Blanchett
Directed by: Joe Wright
Screenplay by: Seth Lochhead and David Farr

   If you like a movie that is somewhat obscure, "Hanna" is the perfect movie.  It's action packed, and off beat.
  A 16 year old girl, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan), who lives with her father, Erik Heller (Eric Bana), possibly a rogue CIA operative, is trained to be a badass teenage assassin in the great white north.  Her target, Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), a high ranking CIA operative who once worked with Heller.  All Hanna must do is flip a switch that tells Marissa where she and Heller are.  They split up and meet somewhere in Berlin where they plan to kill Marissa.  Meanwhile, she's got the best people in the agency after both of them.  This sends Hanna all across Europe where she meets a family that picks her up and takes her most of the way to Berlin.  The big question: What's going to happen to both of them once they meet Marissa?
   The acting is awesome.  All the actors deliver very strong performances in their respective roles.  Ronan makes everyone she fights seem extraordinarily weak.  The fight scenes are rather short in this film.  Although they are short, they are thrilling and action packed.
   Another positive is the score.  It's completely different than what I would have expected.  After seeing the trailer, I thought it had to be interesting because I had never heard of the Chemical Brothers.  They create a techno score as opposed to the orchestrated epic music we are used to hearing in the background of action thrillers similar to this.  It feels like you're watching a fight, but at the same time, you're in a night club.  Techno music and fight scenes are two aspects of film that don't usually go together very well, but the Chemical Brothers have made them work together extraordinarily well.
   Some of the cinematography is excellent as well, but in other parts it's too shaky and can easily make one in the audience dizzy.  In one scene, Heller gets off a bus and walks into a subway station across the street and the camera never cuts.  It's about two minutes of an awesome scene similar to a scene in Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas" (the scene where the main character goes into the restaurant from the taxi).
   The story is rather unclear at a few parts.  How do Heller and Hanna get to some places?  We see that they are in places like Berlin, Spain, or Morocco, but how do they get there?  It's not always clear.  Also, some of the characters are not well developed, like Heller.  I said that he is possibly a rogue CIA operative because it seems like his most likely occupation.  We don't really know why he is running from Marissa, and why she wants to capture him, or what he really does.
   Overall, I really enjoyed this film.  I say, see it before it goes on DVD.  I'm not usually one for films that aren't that mainstream, but this is now one of my favorite indy films.  I hope to see more films from Joe Wright in the future.
   This film gets an A-.

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