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seriousficSo, I feel Hanna is a really good movie for about two-thirds of the way, but it doesn't quite stick the landing. It's not that the ending sucks or it turns out that Jimmy Olsen is really Henry James Olsen, it's just that the payoffs for a lot of the build-up isn't as satisfying as you would've expected. But throughout, there's a care and finesse to the picture, with a lot of the film's energy devoted to artistry, metaphor, and general literacy rather than CGI and explosions. It's honestly refreshing. Then it comes time to wrap things up.
Okay, so first off, there's some business with Hanna being genetically altered. There's a test that shows her DNA is abnormal, so you think they're going somewhere with that. Is she a clone of Cate Blanchett? Does she have some kind of weird time bomb sickness? Is this all a stealth Wolverine sequel, and she's X-23, and the movie is going to end with her popping claws and ripping someone's throat out? No, she's just the result of a program to create the perfect soldier.
Listen, Hollywood, as soon as Captain America is out, I think we should put a moratorium on the "perfect soldier" plot device. Because it's honestly ridiculous at this point. "Yes, we thought the perfect soldier should have rape-tentacles and a scorpion tail." Hanna has the more conservative increased strength and speed (which I would've chalked up to her being trained since birth as an assassin), and I think there was something about removing the gene for pity (which has no bearing on the plot, since you could chalk her social awkwardness up to her being trained since birth as an assassin). So the twist is both boring and unnecessary. Plus, would a soldier without pity really be perfect? I thought the big deal now was winning hearts and minds. You'd want a soldier who was empathetic, not one who would fry up a bunch of civilians to complete his mission, because when that shit gets on CNN, the people who voted you into office will be angry with you.
The other twist is that Eric Bana isn't Hanna's father, which forms the crux of their inevitable conflict. I feel that's the movie wussing out on the real conflict. We spend the entire movie with Hanna as she experiences the outside world and realizes how odd her upbringing was, so we're waiting for her to call the old man out on how he's a scumbag who turned her into a freak. Instead, it's that he lied about being her biological father. Look, she was raised in a cabin in the woods. Where would she even get the notion that there's this all-important difference between biological fathers and adoptive fathers? Did Erik spend a lot of time shit-talking adoption? Because if he did, it was really short-sighted of him.
Then Erik gets killed, completely absolving the story of any further exploration of his abuse of Hanna. It's not quite redemption equals death, but death equals redemption, like the movie is throwing up its hands and saying "He died, what more comeuppance do you want?" Kick-Ass kinda did the same thing with Nicolas Cage, but that was more of a popcorn movie. As a movie that's taking a much more cerebral approach to the same premise, I was expecting a different resolution to the big central conflict of the film.
Lastly, there's an oddly dropped storyline. Hanna spends pretty much the entire second act with a family of English tourists, doing the whole "learning to live again" thing. So at the end, they get caught by the bad guys, one of them unwittingly reveals where Hanna is going… and that's it. We never find out what happened to them. Sure, we can infer that they were killed off, but I would expect a story with such pretensions to have something more to do with pretty much the entire supporting cast than fridge them without the heroine seeming to know or care about their fates.
Also, I think the CIA in this movie should review some of their procedures. Like, if there are five of you and you've surrounded a rogue agent, maybe instead of engaging him in hand-to-hand combat, you could shoot him or taser him or something? Something with a minuscule chance of him being able to punch you. And if you're building some clandestine secret prison, maybe instead of making it a bunch of concrete tunnels with lots of hiding places and strobe lights to come on when someone escapes, you could just have two doors, and before you can go through the second one, the first one has to be closed and locked? That way, even if someone escapes their cell, they won't be able to escape and wind up killing you?
There was also some chatter recently about the director badmouthing Sucker Punch, which comes across as a bit of blowhardery to me. Say what you will about the heroines' sexuality there, but Hanna doesn't even have one. When she is confronted with a sexual situation, the screenplay plays it off as a joke, so unless you want to give the movie a lesbian or incestuous subtext, the heroine is asexual. Which has its own unfortunate implications. Also, for most of the movie, Hanna is following a man's orders (and, again, she doesn't really break free of him so much as have a petty argument and then see him die), so it seems disingenuous to me to position Hanna is the feminist alternative to Sucker Punch.
Okay, so first off, there's some business with Hanna being genetically altered. There's a test that shows her DNA is abnormal, so you think they're going somewhere with that. Is she a clone of Cate Blanchett? Does she have some kind of weird time bomb sickness? Is this all a stealth Wolverine sequel, and she's X-23, and the movie is going to end with her popping claws and ripping someone's throat out? No, she's just the result of a program to create the perfect soldier.
Listen, Hollywood, as soon as Captain America is out, I think we should put a moratorium on the "perfect soldier" plot device. Because it's honestly ridiculous at this point. "Yes, we thought the perfect soldier should have rape-tentacles and a scorpion tail." Hanna has the more conservative increased strength and speed (which I would've chalked up to her being trained since birth as an assassin), and I think there was something about removing the gene for pity (which has no bearing on the plot, since you could chalk her social awkwardness up to her being trained since birth as an assassin). So the twist is both boring and unnecessary. Plus, would a soldier without pity really be perfect? I thought the big deal now was winning hearts and minds. You'd want a soldier who was empathetic, not one who would fry up a bunch of civilians to complete his mission, because when that shit gets on CNN, the people who voted you into office will be angry with you.
The other twist is that Eric Bana isn't Hanna's father, which forms the crux of their inevitable conflict. I feel that's the movie wussing out on the real conflict. We spend the entire movie with Hanna as she experiences the outside world and realizes how odd her upbringing was, so we're waiting for her to call the old man out on how he's a scumbag who turned her into a freak. Instead, it's that he lied about being her biological father. Look, she was raised in a cabin in the woods. Where would she even get the notion that there's this all-important difference between biological fathers and adoptive fathers? Did Erik spend a lot of time shit-talking adoption? Because if he did, it was really short-sighted of him.
Then Erik gets killed, completely absolving the story of any further exploration of his abuse of Hanna. It's not quite redemption equals death, but death equals redemption, like the movie is throwing up its hands and saying "He died, what more comeuppance do you want?" Kick-Ass kinda did the same thing with Nicolas Cage, but that was more of a popcorn movie. As a movie that's taking a much more cerebral approach to the same premise, I was expecting a different resolution to the big central conflict of the film.
Lastly, there's an oddly dropped storyline. Hanna spends pretty much the entire second act with a family of English tourists, doing the whole "learning to live again" thing. So at the end, they get caught by the bad guys, one of them unwittingly reveals where Hanna is going… and that's it. We never find out what happened to them. Sure, we can infer that they were killed off, but I would expect a story with such pretensions to have something more to do with pretty much the entire supporting cast than fridge them without the heroine seeming to know or care about their fates.
Also, I think the CIA in this movie should review some of their procedures. Like, if there are five of you and you've surrounded a rogue agent, maybe instead of engaging him in hand-to-hand combat, you could shoot him or taser him or something? Something with a minuscule chance of him being able to punch you. And if you're building some clandestine secret prison, maybe instead of making it a bunch of concrete tunnels with lots of hiding places and strobe lights to come on when someone escapes, you could just have two doors, and before you can go through the second one, the first one has to be closed and locked? That way, even if someone escapes their cell, they won't be able to escape and wind up killing you?
There was also some chatter recently about the director badmouthing Sucker Punch, which comes across as a bit of blowhardery to me. Say what you will about the heroines' sexuality there, but Hanna doesn't even have one. When she is confronted with a sexual situation, the screenplay plays it off as a joke, so unless you want to give the movie a lesbian or incestuous subtext, the heroine is asexual. Which has its own unfortunate implications. Also, for most of the movie, Hanna is following a man's orders (and, again, she doesn't really break free of him so much as have a petty argument and then see him die), so it seems disingenuous to me to position Hanna is the feminist alternative to Sucker Punch.
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Date: 2011-04-14 10:29 pm (UTC)I got the same feeling watching Hancock and I am Legend (by chance both Will Smith movies) and I know for fact that I am Legend got meshed with the Richard Matheson title just to up it's popularity.