In the Brandon Fibbs Book of Movieisms it is stated: “A bad film is not the worst kind of film. A bad film is simply bad. It does not aspire to be anything better. But a film with potential to be great that squanders its promise by either action or inaction is a far more egregious and indefensible transgression.” Guess which category Hanna falls into?

Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) is your typical 16-year-old girl. She has above average intelligence, is phenomenally inquisitive, speaks a half dozen languages, lives off the grid in a remote cabin below the Arctic circle (spectacularly photographed by cinematographer Alwin Kuchler), hunts elk with a bow and arrow, and is capable of taking out a special forces platoon without so much as breaking a sweat. Come to think of it, she’s nothing like your typical 16-year-old girl.

In this rustic home school, where the only text books are old encyclopedias and a worn copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the motto is simple: “Adapt or die.” Hanna’s ex-CIA father Erik (Eric Bana) is the ultimate survivalist and has trained his daughter to be the perfect assassin for what he knows must come—the day Hanna’s natural desire to see the outside world runs her headlong into Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), Erik’s old handler, who harbors one hell of a longstanding grudge. That day is now.

Hanna follows its protagonist from icy Finland to a secret subterranean base in the deserts of Morocco to the streets of Berlin, while eluding agents (Tom Hollander as a sadistic, whistling assassin in a yellow tracksuit) dispatched to take her out. Along the way, Hanna confronts startling revelations about her existence and uncertainty about her very humanity. Hanna is basically a coming-of-age story, a journey of self-discovery with heavy assault weaponry.

Hanna is a new step for director Joe Wright, known for his literary adaptations like Pride & Prejudice, Atonement and The Soloist. Despite the fact that Hanna has all the usual panache and style of a Wright film—including a color palette that is, at times monochromatic and other times explosively bright, and a depiction of violence that is beautiful not in a pornographic sense but in a truly aesthetic sense—the film still crashes and burns.

One of the first things you are taught when training for a long distance race is to pace yourself from the very first step. Start too quickly and you’ll soon fall behind and drop out. It’s advice Seth Lochhead and David Farr, the writers of Hanna, should have taken, for while the film starts with a whole lot of whizbang, it quickly devolves into an overlong and increasingly tedious chase film. Hanna is frontloaded with all kinds of interesting and spectacular fun, but the filmmakers forgot to leave enough in the tank to make the ending equally so. It’s not that Hanna runs off the rails so much as it runs out of creative steam.

The big reveal that we’ve spent the entire movie waiting for is, well, lame. Pedestrian. Unimaginative. On the one hand, who cares? After all, the film is clearly about the journey and not the narrative destination. On the other hand, the buildup was so great and the generated anticipation so palpable that such an obtuse denouement strikes one as nothing more than indolent filmmaking. You can almost imagine director Wright saying, “Oh you noticed that, huh? We thought you’d be distracted by the broken bones and double tap to the head over there.”

Hanna fails at walking a thin line between reality and surrealism. Clearly meant to evoke a dark fairy tale—the film’s showdown takes place in Berlin’s derelict Brothers Grimm amusement park, a sprawling campus of decrepit swan boats and rides built to look like the giant open jaws of a wolf—Hanna instead begins realistically enough (the implausibility of a child assassin is, counter-intuitively, one of the things that works like gangbusters) but climaxes as a bizarre, fantastical and ultimately irritating nightmare.

Saoirse Ronan (Wright’s Oscar-nominated Atonement discovery)—indeed nearly all of the actors in the film—cannot be held accountable for Hanna’s failure. (The customarily great Blanchett is one of the film’s sole exceptions, delivering a hammy, caricatured performance.) They do their best with the material they are given. In Ronan’s case, they elevate it. Ronan is one of the greatest actors of her young generation and she is captivating here not only as a pint-sized assassin (evoking both La Femme Nikita and Natalie Portman in The Professional), but also in her extraordinary childlike wonder at the world blossoming around her. Isolated for her entire life, things as basic as music, electricity, airplanes, television and even best friends and handsome boys are utterly foreign concepts and more often than not present themselves as an avalanche of sensory overload. Hanna is as naive as she is lethal.

Hanna is the sort of film you really want to like, if for no other reason than it has everything going for it. However, as hypnotic as it can be, the film is too uneven to succeed. If its second half were as strong as its first, Hanna would have been a tremendous film. But like a lover who brags about his prowess in bed but cannot deliver when the moment comes, the climax is overlong, tedious and deeply disappointing.

© Copyright 2011 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by Joe Wright
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Cate Blanchett, Eric Bana, Jessica Barden, Tom Hollander, Olivia Williams, Aldo Maland, Jason Flemyng, Michelle Dockery
Rated PG-13 for violence, some sexual material and language.
Running Time: 105 minutes