Hanna, Joe Wright’s action thriller about a teenager trained from childhood to be an assassin, is the movie you’d most want to see projected on monitors the next time you’re 23 and getting drunk at a nightclub. The pounding Chemical Brothers soundtrack would drown out the sillier parts of the screenplay, and you’d catch dazzling glimpses of apprentice killer Hanna racing through Morocco’s dry heat or an abandoned East German amusement park. Her karate chops and kicks would inform your dancing. The movie would travel through your veins like a drug, doubling your good time.
But when viewed in more mundane circumstances — namely, a movie theater — Hanna’s buzz isn’t as pure. Over-eager in almost every way, the movie keeps pressing scenes of deliberate weirdness on us. Some of these oddball moments do work to illustrate our heroine’s sense of disorientation. Educated but socially almost feral, Hanna has never been out of the landscape near the Arctic Circle where she was raised — until suddenly she’s in the middle of a desert, face to face with a pushy English girl holding a parasol. Other scenes feel more like something imagined by an over-caffeinated, under-confident David Lynch, as when Hanna’s target, the CIA agent Marissa , stops for reinforcements at a sex club featuring hermaphrodites. The only constant is Ronan When Hanna is “ready,” she’ll lose the purity of her sheltered world and summon her target by pushing a lever on a creaky old machine that looks like something out of Lost’s ’70s segments. When that blood-red light flashes, somewhere across the world, Marissa goes on high alert. Marissa isn’t scared so much as she is tantalized; she feels some sense of ownership toward the girl.
As Hanna attempts to complete her mission, Wright whirls through scenes with a wild energy — and then, unexpectedly, turns the movie into a fish-out-of-water story. Erik has taught Hanna to speak every language from German to Arabic, but not what function a passport serves, how to turn on an electric switch or what normal kids are like. Being trapped in an underground bunker the size of the Pentagon doesn’t faze her, but when she first encounters that English girl, Sophie , and her little brother, Miles , Hanna stares at them as if they were Martians.
The interlude that follows — Hanna’s travels with Sophie and her hippie parents — may strike some as a distraction from the important business of being a possibly-superhuman sylph kicking the stuffing out of grown men like Marissa’s No. 1 henchman
