I found it amusing to watch both Black Widow and this film with a rather similar premise in short order, young women superspies being a Hollywood staple now. This one seemed to have rapidly dropped off the radar soon after release which is a shame because it is an excellently made film in many respects and I really appreciated how it creates a character who comes across as every bit as deadly as Black Widow, if not more so, without feeling at all like a superhero movie. Unfortunately it also has flaws and might have made for a more impressive spectacle with a bigger budget.

Hanna is raised alone by her father Erik in the woods, is trained in extensive combat skills and taught multiple languages and general knowledge from an encyclopedia. Like any other child, she yearns to see the outside world but is told that they have a terrible enemy, Marissa Wiegler, who will surely hunt them and kill them if they end their isolation. He leaves her with a device that will notify Wiegler of their location, letting her decide when to activate it, and leaves her. After Hanna presses the button, a large CIA strike team duly arrives and takes her into custody. Even as she struggles to cope with everything, Hanna asks to see Wiegler. Unbeknownst to her, a body double is brought to her and Hanna quickly kills the double and escapes the facility to the outside world. As Hanna tries to get to Germany where she has been instructed to meet with Erik, in the process learning about how normal people live and the secrets of her own origins, the real Marissa gathers her forces to recapture her.

The opening scenes are incredible and effectively act as a training montage to establish her character. As we watch her hunting a stag and fending off an ambush from Erik in the process, we get a sense of her superior but not superhuman skills, and how utterly ruthless she can be when fighting. The arrival of the CIA strike team and Hanna’s subsequent escape is all great too and then after that we have the cooldown where Hanna befriends a perfectly ordinary family on vacation. It has all of the makings of a solid action thriller with some attention paid to character development as well. There are similarities with the Jason Bourne series here as Hanna tries to apply her book knowledge to the real world and socializes with ordinary children her age. At the same time, there is a kind of dark fairy tale theme running through the film, with Hanna being a girl who comes out of the woods rather than going into one, and her great enemy Wiegler being an evil witch. It makes it feel that this is the work of a director who knows what he is doing and is going for some specific aim.

Unfortunately this is as good as it gets and the film’s second half is far weaker than its first. None of the later action set pieces are even close to as impressive to those early on, completely dashing all expectations of more amazing feats on Hanna’s part. It’s not clear why Hanna even considers the agents chasing her to be much of a threat. If she can evade or kill squads of soldiers with assault rifles and armor, surely a few agents in suits in the city would be nothing. I might be mollified if they tried to convey that Hanna has learned remorse and to be more hesitant to kill but it doesn’t feel like they’re going for that angle. The film similarly flubs the character development. Her doubting her father later is just standard fare and is not accorded proper closure. She never develops any kind of relationship with Wiegler at all, making their little duel at the end both implausible, as Hanna should be far deadlier, and inconsequential, as there is no emotional weight. The film tries to lean in more heavily with the fairy tale theme later on but there doesn’t seem to be anything of substance underneath the imagery and it doesn’t even attempt to explain the presence of the mysterious friend who seems to be the caretaker of the abandoned fun fair.

I’m not sure what went wrong here as it had such a promising start. Perhaps it needed a bigger budget to have more impressive fight scenes. Perhaps it was because director Joe Wright was brought in to direct a script that was written on spec and didn’t feel particularly inspired by the project. It’s actually still good enough that it’s worth watching but this could have been such a great spy thriller for the ages so it’s such a shame that it kind of falls apart towards the end.