Han­na

From the blood­ied dunes of Dunkirk to the putrid streets of LA’s Skid Row, Joe Wright has long sought to extract beau­ty from chaos. No sur­prise, then, that oil paint­ing com­po­si­tions pep­per the British director’s first crack at high-ener­gy action like flash­es of calm in a storm of bul­lets and brimstone.

Indeed, a dra­mat­ic mid-shot of a swan nes­tled between bro­ken panes in a Finnish ice drift estab­lish­es an eeri­ly pas­sive equi­lib­ri­um before our epony­mous hero­ine announces her­self with an arrow.

Hav­ing been raised in iso­la­tion in this bit­ter sub-arc­tic wilder­ness by her father, Erik (Eric Bana), Han­na (Saoirse Ronan, so haunt­ing in Wright’s Atone­ment and again here) is more accus­tomed to gut­ting deer than kiss­ing boys. As well as mak­ing Kick-Ass’ Hit-Girl look like a puny apple-pol­ish­er, our Hanna’s a mul­ti­lin­gual assas­sin. Mean­ing? Not only will she deliv­er a frosty pay-off line after she’s fin­ished fuck­ing you up, she’ll have the com­mon cour­tesy to do so in your native tongue.

Mean­while Cate Blanchett recy­cles her south­ern twang from Ben­jamin But­ton to good effect as CIA meta-bitch Maris­sa Wiegler, who’s hell­bent on track­ing down Han­na and her ​‘rogue asset’ papa after they cer­e­mo­ni­al­ly blow their own cover.

As Erik van­ish­es, Han­na is exposed. Out of the for­est and into the real world jun­gle, she’ll have to nego­ti­ate a host of unknown haz­ards, but there’s no sce­nario this fer­al child can’t bite and brawl her way out of. There’s an issue here, how­ev­er, in that Hanna’s fight for sur­vival, while exhil­a­rat­ing, nev­er pro­vides that knife-edge moment; that flake of fal­li­bil­i­ty that’s so cru­cial when it comes to human­is­ing action heroes.

This over­sight is addressed late on by a rev­e­la­tion con­cern­ing Hanna’s super­hu­man DNA, but this is a lazy char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, not the thought-pro­vok­ing twist it pre­sum­ably looked on paper.

That’s not to say that Ronan doesn’t shine. After being mis­used by Peters Jack­son and Weir in her pre­vi­ous two big screen out­ings, the 17-year-old holds her own con­sum­mate­ly along­side a deli­cious­ly fierce Blanchett. The pair share bare­ly a frac­tion of screen time, but their cat-and-mouse chem­istry is invalu­able when you con­sid­er how incon­gru­ous the rest of the cast feels (includ­ing Bana, who resur­faces for a few speedy cos­tume changes before get­ting lost in the plot).

As if Wright’s readi­ness to show off his artis­tic flair and paint Han­na as a twist­ed mod­ern-day fairy tale isn’t jar­ring enough, Tom Hol­lan­der chan­nelling Annie Lennox as a campy neo-Nazi boun­ty hunter cer­tain­ly wasn’t called for.

A thump­ing Chem­i­cal Broth­ers score instils rou­tine fight sequences with some much-need­ed vigour, but any intrigue estab­lished in the film’s for­ma­tive scenes is smoth­ered by a direc­tor unable to over­come his own art house ambitions.