Shame on Cate Blanchett! Shame on her! Shame!!

Shame on her for participating in this “vomitorium.” Same goes for Tom Hollander and Saoirse Ronan.

Hanna is one of the revolting new breed of “video game movies” that are currently assaulting us. Do not fall for the preview, which makes the movie look a bit like SALT, because it’s nothing like SALT or any other semi-dignified political action thriller. Everything in Hanna is completely and absurdly fake – the characters, the sets, the fighting, the action, everything – to the point where one’s brain quickly glazes over from the comic book-like abstraction of it all. There is literally no story, unless you call “a genetic super-girl exists whom everyone is trying to kill” a story – I would say that is not even a story idea, but merely a pitiful excuse for two hours of pointless violence and chase scenes.  When the credits rolled, I whispered to my wife “Screenplay By: a retarded sixth grader.”

Listen to the set-up for this movie and tell me it is not written for people with bubblegum brains: Eric Bana and Saoirse Ronan live in the arctic wilderness, bow hunting and reading to each other from the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Somehow, Ronan has learned to speak every language on Earth fluently (don’t ask.) Okay, Bana has an electric box that tells the CIA where he and Ronan are located. He tells Ronan: “flip that switch and ‘she’ will never stop until she’s killed you.” So Ronan flips the switch (of course – who wouldn’t?) and she and Bana outline the plan: they are going to go from Arctic Norway to some house in Berlin, separately. That’s the story, literally. Bana then does a close shave, changes out of his arctic survival gear and into a blue pinstripe suit and walks hundreds of miles through frozen wilderness (in wingtips and with no topcoat!) and then strips to a jock strap and swims across the North Sea. Simple! The movie, then, consists of people chasing them with the intention of killing them by whatever means necessary, and slaughtering anyone even remotely involved with either of them.

Since this movie really only exists to convey scenes of violence and death to the viewer, I’m going to limit my comments to that, so as to get this review overwith all the sooner. The fight scenes are, collectively, the worst I have ever seen in a movie. Period.  At their “best” they look like people playing fucking pattycake. At their worst they define the new low water mark for the art, and literally look like the crap-ass animation one finds in XBox video games. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the fakeness of the sped-up fight choreography that we’ve seen in action films for the last decade or so, typified by the Bourne movies. I’m talking about fight scenes where the filmmakers actually abandon the cinematic art in favor of the visual dog shit that a nation of video game obsessives is apparently used to seeing and now expects. The scene where Eric Bana meets and fights with the four guys in the subway is the most offensive example of this, and as such is the worst movie fight scene of all time. I can’t even imagine what they did to take a live action sequence involving actual human beings and turn it into something that looks like jerky, visually-discontinuous video game fighting! There are other fight scenes which also stoop to this new low, and I found these sequences deeply offensive and saddening, and felt like demanding my money back for having to watch them.

As for the violence, there is a lot of it, it’s ultra glamorized and none of it makes any sense.

Enough of this! Fuck this ridiculous movie!