Ok, so when a trailer like this drops at the tail end of 2010 - it's hard not to describe it as
Salt meets
Kick-Ass! The movie is
Hanna, the latest unpredictable effort from Pride & Prejudice and Atonement director
Joe Wright who strays away from dramatic material to give us the story of a 14 year old assassin (
Saoirse Ronan) who like Hit-Girl is raised by her father (a miscast
Eric Bana from the looks of things) into a precise, animalistic, cold-hearted killer for an unspecified mission. When she is caught by agents, she pulls an Evelyn Salt and escapes from confinement, killing a few suits in the process and goes on the run, hoping to settle down with a new family... but CIA spy
Cate Blanchett won't relent on tracking her down. And a bleach blonde
Tom Hollander, bizarrely, is also after her. There's also undeniably a touch of Luc Besson's
The Professional in this. Watch it... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRUx88vRjIk You know this week we've spoken a lot about genre hopping directors with
James Mangold and
Joe Wright who seem to weave in and out of any kind of picture, putting their own personal stamp on oft-told cinematic situations. And with both guys I'm thinking... if I were the head honcho at Marvel, why not take a chance on one of these guys for
Iron Man 3? I'm intrigued by this trailer and although it feels a bit messy in places and obviously stretches the plausibility of the situation (though Wright has called it a 'fairytale movie' in the past), it certainly feels like it belongs on the high-scale of the 2011 picture slate. I love the imagery, especially that fairground sequence which I don't know what to make of yet. I just love how much presence Cate Blanchett gives here, this is how effective I had imagined she would have been in
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull but sadly wasn't.