(2011) "I just missed your heart," Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) says twice in director Joe Wright's Grimm-like action/mystery film (story and screenplay by Seth Lockhead with David Farr), which largely missed nailing my interest in the second half of the picture.

Raised for fifteen years in primitive isolation in a forest of Finland by her papa, Erik Heller (Eric Bana), Hanna, an abnormally special blonde teenager, has not since early childhood had access to electricity, television, music, modern conveniences, and other human beings. Prepared for a lethal mission to assassinate her mother's killer, intelligence operative Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett), Hanna has been trained to be self-sufficient, kill wild game, and fight like a soldier; but she's not prepared for the knowledge of who and what she actually is.

When Erik, a rogue agent, eludes the CIA team sent to bring him in, because he possesses intelligence about a covert project Marissa formerly headed and shutdown, Hanna is captured and taken to a holding facility in Morocco. After she escapes and mails a postcard ("The witch is dead") to Erik, she makes acquaintance with a vacationing British family, whose daughter Sophie (Jessica Barden) befriends Hanna; their relationship occasionally introduces weak moments of humor.

While Marissa dispatches her agents to eliminate Erik, he's singularly intent on killing her. Meanwhile, Marissa assigns a team under Isaacs (Tom Hollander), an assassin who operates outside legal channels, to find Hanna on her way to a rendezvous with Erik in Berlin.

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Copyright © 2011 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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