Hollywood so often uses foreign-accented types for its villains, and American media in general spends so much time bashing Europeans as cheese-eating surrender-monkeys, that it's good to see ol' Europe hitting back. "Hanna," the slick new action thriller by Londoner Joe Wright, is the third film this summer to posit the CIA and U.S. military as the bad guys, following on the heels of "Essential Killing" and "The Ghost Writer." The sour taste left by secret prisons, waterboarding and the like clearly seems to be lingering.
"Hanna" begins amid Arctic snow and ice, far from civilization; an extremely tough dude in furs (Eric Bana) is raising his teenage daughter, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan, "The Lovely Bones"), to hunt, shoot, and fight like the devil. Is her dad a survivalist? Maybe a Biblical rapture nut? Nope, he's a former secret agent who's gone off the grid. When he feels his daughter is ready, he produces a transponder and unlocks the box, telling Hanna, "If I flip that switch, it tells Marissa Regler where we are. She won't stop till you're dead."
Marissa Regler (Cate Blanchett), as we learn through flashbacks, is the merciless CIA agent responsible for shooting Hanna's mother; why she's after Hanna is the mystery that drives the film. Soon enough, Hanna has been picked up by a masked U.S. commando team and "renditioned" to a secret underground prison, where Regler seeks some answers, and Hanna seeks Regler.
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