Hanna (2019)

Farr appropriately fleshes out his characters to justify spending more time with them and builds a broader backstory than just a father and daughter vs. one rogue CIA agent. ... Enos remains a more compelling silent figure; her Marissa is cloaked in secrecy through the first three hours, so her additions to the role are subtle. Creed-Miles is the standout, but Kinnaman holds his own in this three-player adventure.

At its tautest, Hanna doesn’t so much grip you as sit figuratively on your chest, forcing all the breath out.

Slow as a movie stretched four sizes too big: ideal for those who wanted more dreamy club scenes in Jack Ryan. [29 Mar 2019, p.47]

It’s an unfortunate irony that the TV series that shares its name, and the basic architecture of its plot, should feel so tepid and cursory, so very much like all the action-lady knock-offs glutting our screens for years now.

The first episode ends with Hanna forcibly heading out into the wider world, albeit not in the way you might predict. After seeing brief flashes of her in action on her home turf – fast, efficient, crafty – the prospect of Hanna operating in a modern urban environment is tantalising enough to tune in for the full season.

It's really only in the third episode that Hanna begins to stake its own ground, but probably since that ground is oddly conventional, I can't review that episode, so as far as I can review it, Hanna is the movie told as an elongated TV narrative of 48-minute episodes that, oddly, doesn't give all that much more character expansion. ... At least Hanna has been cast very well.

For all of its various attempts to balance Eastern European espionage, half-hearted explorations of parenting and femininity, a youth drama, a father-daughter story, a pulse-pounding conspiracy thriller, a character study (though kudos to Mireille Enos for what she does with her Marissa) and the kind of pulp pleasure where a young girl can gun down an army without blinking, it never really finds a groove to settle into.

In the scenes when all three are engaged, stalking through European cities, joyriding helicopters, and shooting out genteel outdoor cafés, Hanna feels explosively good, the rare intelligent action thriller that subverts storytelling tropes and surfs on its own ingenuity. In other scenes, that ingenuity gets lost in a mood board of decorative visuals (light dappling through fabric, leaves dancing in the wind) that bloats the series’ running time and hobbles its pace, especially given that the central mystery is easy to decipher.

The results are mixed: mostly sad, with a glimmer of hope at the end.

Boiled down to its essential elements, Hanna is a bland fish-out-of water tale punctuated by short bursts of sudden violence.

For even casual viewers, Hanna is foiled by a deadly combination of slow pacing and a predictable course of events.

Somewhere in the attempt to turn this story into a series, it feels like Hanna forgot to stop and be curious in between ass-kickings.

The new show lacks the glimmering creativity of its source material, and, perversely enough, it manages to feel overstuffed despite its relative lack of inventive flourishes.