Something to watch tonight: Thursday 16 January

Hanna (Wright, 2011)

Firstly, yet anoth­er apo­logy for miss­ing an update yes­ter­day. I got a late offer to record and edit At the Summer Movies in-house with an engin­eer at RNZ rather than fum­bling around in the home stu­dio so I thought I should take it. You can listen to the res­ults here. I’ve been pretty happy with how the homemade ver­sions have come out but it’s always bet­ter to have someone else in the room with you.

Joe Wright’s Hanna was a mod­est hit back in 2011 – and my ori­gin­al review wavered a little bit – but I’m fonder of it now, espe­cially since the Prime Video TV adapt­a­tion came out in 2019 to remind me. I seem to recall enjoy­ing that series, too, but we didn’t go back for sea­sons two and three and I can’t remem­ber why.

Here’s my review of the ori­gin­al film from the Capital Times:

Joe Wright’s globe-trotting thrill­er Hanna is prop­erly puzz­ling. After due con­sid­er­a­tion I think I like it but I can ima­gine some view­ers find­ing the abrupt shifts in tone and the unex­pec­ted (and argu­ably unearned) comed­ic moments too dis­tract­ing. Hanna (Saoirse Ronan from The Lovely Bones) is a teen­age girl, liv­ing in a remote cab­in some­where in the Arctic Circle with dad Eric Bana. He’s a former spook who some­how escaped when dodgy CIA oper­at­ive Cate Blanchett turned on him when Hanna was just a toddler.

Ever since then he’s been plot­ting his revenge and Hanna is to be the instru­ment of it. She’s a killing machine, trained for one pur­pose and once unleashed she com­mences her mis­sion with com­mend­able single-mindedness. Except the out­side world sur­prises her, and the people she meets (the ones not try­ing to kill her, at least) sug­gest her fath­er has missed out a lot about the pos­it­ive side of human nature and what it feels like to be a teenager.

So, the film altern­ates between well-constructed viol­ent action set-pieces (fea­tur­ing an often pun­ish­ingly loud soundtrack by the Chemical Brothers) and the coming-of-age char­ac­ter stuff. The ques­tion then becomes which strand of the story will decide the character’s fate. There’s a lot to enjoy in Hanna, not least Wright’s intel­li­gent use of unusu­al loc­a­tions, but it ulti­mately feels like an oppor­tun­ity missed. At the begin­ning (and the end) Hanna says to a char­ac­ter she’s just shot, “I just missed your heart” and that goes for the film as a whole too, I think.

Also in the Capital Times that week: Asif Kapadia’s mas­ter­ful doc­u­ment­ary Senna (which will be a recom­mend­a­tion here soon as it, too, is now on loc­al Netflix), the 25^th anniversary reis­sue of Footrot Flats: The Dog’s Tail Tale, Final Destination 5 and Italian thrill­er The Double Hour.

Where to watch Hanna

Aotearoa: Streaming on Netflix

Australia: Streaming on Netflix and Binge

Canada: Streaming on Netflix and Hollywood On Demand

Ireland & UK: Streaming on Prime Video and Sky

India: Streaming on Netflix

USA: Digital rental

Further reading

Auckland sub­scriber JG has his own news­let­ter which is one of my Substack recommendations.

On Tuesday he made a pos­it­ive con­tri­bu­tion to the dis­cus­sion of inter­na­tion­al affairs by mak­ing a cred­ible case that Donald Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland can be laid at the door of act­or Gerard Butler (yet anoth­er thing we can blame him for):

In Trump’s tiny, fet­id brain, Hollywood fic­tion had surely become doc­u­ment­ary truth. Or at least Fox News truth because the thought of Trump watch­ing a doc­u­ment­ary (unless it is about him) is a bridge too far.

In this way Donald Trump came to believe that Gerard Butler was God, speak­ing to him through a Scottish action movie star.

The first real example of Trump’s obses­sion with Gerard Butler came in 2019, when he cre­ated Space Force, say­ing that: “Amid grave threats to our nation­al secur­ity, American superi­or­ity in space is abso­lutely vital. And we’re lead­ing, but we’re not lead­ing by enough. But very shortly we’ll be lead­ing by a lot.”

Space Force was cre­ated a mere two years after the 2017 Gerard Butler film Geostorm, which is about a space-based satel­lite defence sys­tem. A space force.

You should read the whole thing as it’s an inter­est­ing argu­ment and one I hope was promp­ted by my review of Den of Thieves here on Monday.