Friday 13 May 2011

Hanna

Last night, I went to the cinema to see “Hanna”, a spy thriller movie by Atonement director Joe Wright, set in Marocco, Spain, Hamburg, Berlin, and that other hot-bed of “spydom”, Kuusamo in Finnish Lapland.

Hanna is the story of a teenage girl (Saoirse Ronan) raised in the wilderness of Lapland by her father Erik (Eric Bana), who has trained her to be a perfect assassin. Erik is a former CIA spy who betrayed the agency before going into hiding. Eventually the CIA catches up with him, and Hanna gets embroiled in a cat and mouse chase across Europe involving a ruthless intelligence agent (Cate Blanchet) and her operatives.


The good news is “Hanna Lapland” has nothing to do with “Hannah Montana” (soz, couldn’t resist). The bad news is that, at times, the movie tries a bit too hard to be cool. I am not averse to a bit of cinematographic pretentiousness (I am half-French after all), but this is meant to be a thriller.

That said, the soundtrack by the Chemical Brothers is great. And the scenes in Lapland are absolutely stunning – made me long for a winter holiday up there. Perverse really, when you consider that spring has barely sprung in Kuusamo.

2 comments:

  1. oh I NEED to see this now. But there's no way i could watch it with my husband who would just want to keep pointing out all the places in Kuusamo "do you recognise that? that's where blah blah blah...."

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  2. The Lapland bit is only the first 15 minutes. The best bits of the movie, actually.

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