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In the snow-blanketed Finnish wilderness, an albinic Saorsie Ronan fires an arrow into a buck, then chases it down until it topples, defeated. She utters what will become a recurring catchphrase (“I just missed your heart”), then puts a bullet in the animal’s brain. Cut, with abrupt fury, to the movie’s title card — “Hanna,” spelled out in what look like bones against a blood-red background — and the tone is set for this curio of a chase thriller, a sort of Luc-Besson/Tarantino pulse-pounder that brings unique attitude and double-take peculiarity to virtually every scene.
The style — heightened, considerably, by a much-publicized score by The Chemical Brothers — is what distinguishes “Hanna” from, say, “Salt,” whose plot is all but Xeroxes, and a few hundred adventure films with alien-like heroes seeing the world for the first time. Uncannily skilled in combat, Hanna (Ronan) was raised and trained in the wild by her on-the-run, ex-spy father (Eric Bana), and her newfound rite of passage involves a cat-and-mouse game with Dad’s CIA pursuers. Led by Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), a remorseless operative whose violent teeth-brushing is one of the odder oddities, the agents know dark secrets about Hanna’s identity, which is a mystery even to Hanna herself.
A genre film brimming with hyper-embellished subversion, “Hanna” makes you swear it was adapted from a graphic novel. Instead, it’s an original concoction from writers David Farr and Seth Lochhead, directed by Joe Wright, the habitual translator of bestsellers like “Atonement” and “The Soloist.” Jettisoning the gross misguidance he showed with the latter, Wright whisks you from Finland to Morocco to Berlin with breakneck zeal, peppering the path with a pop-savvy gal pal, a hired thug in booty shorts, and a safe house straight out of a Jefferson Airplane acid trip.
You’ll be so jazzed by the movie’s bizarrely impressive punch and kick (not to mention Ronan’s killer performance), you’ll likely overlook its disabling lack of emotional involvement. “Hanna” grabs hold of your senses, but it just misses your heart.
Hanna
PG-13
Three reels out of four
Opens in area theaters tomorrow
Recommended Rental
White Material
Not rated
Available Tuesday
With Isabelle Huppert as her muse, the great Claire Denis explores foreign relations and mounting mania in “White Material,” a structurally brilliant drama about a French coffee farmer living in Africa amidst a turbulent civil war. The word “arresting” doesn’t quite do the film’s vérité look or its twisting revelations justice. SPR
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