HANNA (2011)

 This was a good film.  My only question is whether it's good enough to own.  See, I watch my movies in alphabetical order.  When I get to the end (currently Zorro:  The Gay Blade) I start right over at the beginning (The 3-Penny Opera).  I won't own a movie if I can't watch it multiple times.

So I'm on the fence here.  I love movies with an unlikely hero (check), violence at the drop of a hat (check), and that are visually arresting (check).  HANNA ticks off all the right boxes.  In fact, she reminds me a lot of the character River Tam from Serenity.  She's just slightly too cool, too composed to be a normal 12-year-old girl, which I totally dig.

The cast is great.  Cate Blanchett is rocking the Evil Redhead role, Tom Hollander is wildly creepy as a German assassin, and Eric Bana doesn't suck too terribly much.  Saoirse Ronan is the eponymous Hanna, a girl raised in utter isolation and then released upon the world.  She starts out at a terrible disadvantage, thrust into a race that has simply been on pause during her absence.  A CIA operative will stop at nothing to possess her, her dad just kind of sets her loose with no guidance, and she has absolutely no coping skills for dealing with the rest of the world that a normal adolescent would have.  This becomes glaringly apparent when she meets a girl her own age after escaping from a holding facility in Morocco.  Sophie, her counterpart, can't stop talking about reality TV stars like she knows them, the merits/disadvantages of a boob job, and other trivial ephemera that seem retarded but are totally normal for a kid.  You know what's not normal?  A kid that speaks 7 languages fluently but doesn't know what the sound of a ringing phone is. 

The pint-sized Jason Bourne overcomes her difficulties, either giving things a wide blue-eyed stare like some adorable alien or violently murdering the shit out of people.  Even when her tiny world comes crashing down on her, she bounces back with aplomb and a vicious right kick. 

I'm sure someone will make this into a metaphor for puberty, what with her dad allowing her to make choices, the first real taste of independence and the simultaneous horrors that go with it, navigating the dangerous waters of boys, finding friendship, and being able to take those first tremulous steps toward adulthood, but fuck that.  It's about a tiny spy kicking ass and killing people on two different continents.  That's awesome.