Hanna: Weapon XX

I was along for the ride until it turned out we weren’t going anywhere. In fact, I was really grooving on the film, thanking Orson Welles in heaven above for granting us a mainstream action film this insanely weird! Joe Wright must have spent decades studying Run, Lola, Run to capture Tom Tykwer’s delicate formula (hyper camera + running), though, of course, Tykwer had a method and Wright just had madness, and he marries this with fairy tale imagery, again for no reason, other than, I guess, it’s what we read to little girls, not that either the Grimm tradition of scaring little kids into submission or the Disney tradition of providing them fantastical hope has anything to do with this particular little girl, and we’re treated to the off-kilter performances of a ferocious Saoirse Ronan and Southern-fried Cate Blanchett and Tom Hollander’s take on Peter Lorre with a spring in his step, and all the while blares Hanna’s true claim to fame, a delirious score by the Chemical Brothers that has you wishing you could spend the rest of your days in a wintry German cuckoo clock shop/performance art sex club.

It’s an interesting take on the coming-of-age, with superHanna rendered an alien girl very quickly catching up by learning about friendship, secrets, boys, risk-taking, and, most importantly, the traumatic awakening to the fallibility of idols. Hardly sophisticated, Hanna is at least a series of well-made illustrations, but the film was so bizarre I was sure it would come together. Everything clicked except the fight scenes, the first of which is revolting, another gently balletic as Eric Bana dances with a whole bunch of guys in the German subway from the end of Fox and His Friends, and the final patently absurd—I don’t care how genetically engineered little Saoirse Ronan is, she ain’t no match for that glorious hunk of muscle called Eric Bana. And then the end came, and we were coming full circle like it was meaningful or something even though really it was just pretentious, imitating the look and tidy feel of artfulness without its depth, but maybe I just resent it for making me laugh and vomit simultaneously, which is how I’ve genetically engineered my body to respond to shallow pop art that thinks it’s not. You call that a movie?