Hanna

Now THAT is how you do a tracking shot! Srsly slick moves in Joe Wright's third outing. And that's The Chemical Brothers providing the ass-kicking soundtrack to all the ass-kicking. Visual and sonic killa-bombs galore!

But what's with the fairy-tale motifs, eh? Hanna is trained-up in the Arctic wilds in the ways of C.I.A. ninjas by dour but kindly Eric Bana, then let loose on the world in order to neutralize immaculate ice-queen stepmother Cate Blanchett. But the endless drilling leaves little room for music, beauty and fairy-tales. "I just missed your heart" (a hunter's, rather than Cupid's, arrow) at the start and at the end of the film, followed by bullets, red on white. THE THEME, in a nutshell.

The fairy-tale thing gets silly ONCE, at the end, where we didn't really need another deer appearing to get what's being said. Otherwise, I forgave all the silly bells and whistles. If this is a film about our need for stories, fantasies, friendship-bracelets as the stuff that makes this rat-race life worth living, then let's glory in the magical artifice of it! Cinema! Glorious!

Bradshaw isn't at his best over here, but he does pick up on a certain uncomfortable gender overlay to the film's theme. Hanna's father is the pragmatic survivalist, her mother the passionate alternative type - a pattern repeated with the couple Hanna meets on holiday. And the reason Cate Blanchett is so frosty... well she's made the unnatural choice not to spend her years birthing sprogs, hasn't she? Does funny stuff to the female brain, that. Hmm... Lost a lot of points there.

But the gorgeous goings-on are just distracting enough to make you overlook the questionable thematic content. Worth seeing, if you can still find a screening somewhere...