Child-assassin drama Hanna may be the movie Red Riding Hood only wishes it were, writes John Patterson, but for director Joe Wright it's just a palate cleanser
The trailers I saw before Hanna this weekend suggested, before his new movie had even began, that Joe Wright is on a different track, to put it mildly. Given that they are deliberately selected to appeal to the audience gathered for the main feature, what other Wright movies can one think of ? Atonement? Pride and Prejudice? ? that might be presaged by trailers for Vin Diesel and The Rock in Fast Five (I guess Furious Five was taken), and the apparently super-homoerotic ultimate-fighting flick Warrior (estranged brothers face off in a mixed martial-arts tournament).
Hanna's not really like that: the story of a purpose-raised teenage assassin (Saoirse Ronan), it's a chop-socky Brothers Grimm tale with big, bad wolves and wicked stepmothers ? Pathfinder meets The Company Of Wolves under the sign of The Bourne Identity, all of it with the occasionally risible feel of a good-bad Luc Besson flick. It's the movie Catherine Hardwicke's anaemic Red Riding Hood dreamed of being, and at first it seems like an odd place to find a poetic populist like Wright.
But one of the movie's many pleasures comes in watching Wright ? who always thinks cinematically ? adapt himself to a comic book-inspired piece of intelligent action trash, and he somehow maintains his grip until about 15 minutes before wrap time, when the cliches of the genre finally encircle and unhorse him. There are some splendid action sequences, but Wright also lets his poetic eye wander on occasion (five minutes of flamenco serve no other purpose than to please the eye and ear), something no director of Euro trash franchises like Underworld or Priest would ever stoop to.
But what initially feels like directorial miscasting ends up proving that Wright isn't just Little Miss Austen/McEwan, that he can throw down with the action-men and deliver a 70%, B-minus kind of thriller with the best of them. I suspect his experience on his first true American movie, The Soloist (a neat entry in that sub-genre of British directors putting their first impressions of America on film), may have soured him on Hollywood for now, or at least made him homesick for more hardscrabble film-making methods. Hanna has more heart and soul and brains than its nearest US equivalent (say, Sucker Punch), but you can hear the impatient ticking of its European producer's watch ? and Wright probably prefers it that way.
If Wim Wenders's 1982 road movie The State Of Things is the classic example of a Euro director returning home after a (perhaps unhappy) spell in Hollywood, then Hanna is in the tradition, but somewhere along the middle of the scale. It shows a Joe Wright in transition, determined to evolve, and Hanna, which is rather hollow at its centre, seems largely a palate-cleaning exercise before he figures out what kind of director he wants to be next.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/apr/30/joe-wright-director-hanna-film
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