When Maurice Chevalier sang "Thank Heaven for Little Girls," he was not thinking of Saoirse Ronan, the eponymous heroine of "Hanna," which opens here today. Chevalier was thinking of pink-and-white cuties in pigtails. Ronan, who is as drop-dead gorgeous as any of his coterie, would destroy him and a couple of dozen of them in maybe 90 seconds.
But then, she's a trained assassin who has spent a lot of time and an immense amount of dedication, mostly in the wilds of northern Finland, learning to kill. Animals, of course, like the moose she chases, and dispatches, in the opening sequence. Hanna lives with her dad, the burly, bearded Erik (Eric Bana), who has trained her and who watches her every move.
When her time comes, rather like a mystical signal, she packs up and moves along.
Joe Wright's movie, from a screenplay by Seth Lockhead and David Farr, pushes all the right buttons, but the action is predictable. Cate Blanchett plays a security agent, perhaps from the CIA or one of its many copies, and she's quite good, but all the secret agents who work for her are cut out of the same mold. Ronan is terrific, but there's not nearly enough story to make things work.
Hanna opens today
—Joe