4. Erik Heller - Hanna (2011)
Focus FeaturesI talked about Joe Wright quite extensively in my article on Keira Knightley six months ago. Knightley and Wright have collaborated to date three times, all in period dramas:
Pride and Prejudice,
Atonement and Anna Karenina. But while Knightley seems increasingly content to be typecast in period dramas, Wright has always retained the ability to surprise us - all of which brings us onto Hanna, which reunited him with Saoirse Ronan and brought another good performance out of Bana. Hanna is an action thriller with prominent fairy tale elements which takes place in Finland. Bana plays rogue CIA agent Erik Heller, who has gone into exile with his daughter Hanna (Ronan) and is being hunted by senior CIA officer Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett). Since the age of two, Erik has trained his daughter to be an assassin, and with their enemies beginning to close in he sends her out into the wider world for her own safety. A chase across Europe eventually leads to a woodland confrontration, in which Erik's dark secret is revealed... While not always certain of its generic identity, Hanna is an interesting and memorable effort which includes some of Wright's most eye-catching work. While most of the plaudits have rightfully gone to Ronan, Bana manages to take this most unorthodox of fathers and still imbue him with a lot of believable emotion. Rather than play up his unusual circumstances, like the parents in the Spy Kids series, he dials everything down and lets his rapid delivery do the talking. This makes his more active scenes all the more memorable, with the subway fight being one of the best-shot fight scenes in the last 10 years.