BEFORE: Eric Bana carries over again from "Lucky You". I'll follow a different actor tomorrow - I still have one more film with Bana on my list, but now that I've reached the right number of films to get me to July 4 on time, if I want to add another one in, then I've got to take one away. In this case I've got to make a choice between "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" (with Bana) and the other animated film about Bigfoots/Yetis, which is "Smallfoot" that just started running on HBO, and I see a way that I could squeeze it in next week. Oddly, whichever film I don't watch here in May could be scheduled for July, shortly after "Spider-Man: Far From Home". "Smallfoot" shares an actress with the new Spider-Man film, and the "King Arthur" film could fit in 2 slots after it, as I can already see a film that could connect them - so it doesn't really matter. I'm going to add in "Smallfoot" for next week because it will be closer to "Missing Link" that way, and I can put it 2 days before a THIRD film that has a Bigfoot theme, so there you go.
So know I know the first two films that I think should follow "Spider-Man: Far From Home" and (ideally) get me closer to October 1. Another 68 or 70 films to close that gap, and I could really have something. Forget the halfway point, it's going to be a great relief when I have a plan in place that convinces me I can make it to the end of the year without breaking the chain.
THE PLOT: A sixteen-year-old girl who was raised by her father to be the perfect assassin is dispatched on a mission across Europe, tracked by a ruthless intelligence agent and her operatives.
AFTER: I really like the idea here, a teen girl who's been training her whole life for assassin work - halfway through the film we sort of learn that the training even started before birth, because somebody in a lab or research facility messed with her DNA to increase her reflexes, probably her strength, her focus, with a goal toward growing the perfect bio-weapon. Now, this raises the whole nature/nurture issue, like is she a great assassin because her ex-agent father trained her so hard out in the woods, or was she just born with it? Maybe it's a little bit of both - maybe she's genetically pre-disposed toward the assassin work, but she also needed the training to get really good at it. I guess it would be a shame if the lab-workers improved her DNA and then she just ended up working in a hat shop or something.
She sort of reminds me of several Marvel superheroes, a bit like Black Widow (trained in the Soviet system) or maybe X-23 (female clone of Wolverine, so she started out with the healing factor and the claws). By coincidence, I started binge-watching Season 2 of "Barry" on HBO today, which is also about an assassin/hit-man. Got through four episodes already, now that I'm done with Season 2 of "American Gods", so I should knock the whole season out before the end of the week.
The danger here is crafting a character who's a little TOO good at what they do, but they sort of countered that here by making her fairly clueless about many social aspects of life in the real world. Once she leaves the (Siberian? Ah, no, Finland...) forest, she's a real fish out of water - like she knows what music is, theoretically, but she's never heard it. There's a bit of similarity to "Captain Fantastic" here, too, since she's been home-schooled out in the woods like the kids in that movie, and both movies chose to show us how skilled the kids are at hunting by having them shoot a deer with arrows.
Hanna's father appears to have his own agenda in training her, and over time we learn it's to get revents on his enemies in the CIA - once she chooses to activate a beacon that will tell those agents where they are, he leaves her there and they set up a meeting point in Berlin. It's a little unclear what purpose, exactly, was served by letting his daughter face a squad of CIA agents without him, unless he was using her as a distraction so he could get to Berlin, but this seems a little odd, because if she got captured or followed, that would also tip off the CIA that he was also still active, and not dead. So it's hard to see what the big picture here, as he envisioned it.
Hanna's training kicks in and she takes down several agents, and escapes the underground facility in Morocco (wait, what happened to Finland?) and tags along with a British family in a camper van that's headed for Spain (wait, what happened to Berlin?). She ends up getting followed by a sadistic sort of gender-fluid German agent who feels like a knock-off of a Bond villain, and she's heading for another ex-agent, who lives in an abandoned Grimm's fairy-tale amusement park. Nope, nothing weird about that at all...
This leads to a final showdown with both the agent in charge of the program that created her, and also her father, who finally shows up again in Berlin. Geez, between last night's film with Eric Bana facing off against his father in the World Series of Poker, and this one, this would have made a great chain to watch around Father's Day, I wish I'd known about that or been able to make that work.
This feels like an acceptable origin story for an interesting character, but then the story's sort of over too soon. I heard someone's turned this into a new series on Amazon Prime, I wonder if that's just going to use this movie as a jumping-off point or have to start the whole story over, like a re-boot. Anyway, I won't be watching because I don't have time for another series right now, what with "Cloak and Dagger" and "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." back on the air, plus "Amazing Race", "MasterChef", "America's Got Talent" and then "Stranger Things" coming back in July. I'd hoped this would be the summer I finally had time to watch "Lost", but I can't do that if too many other shows I like are also airing new episodes.
NITPICK POINT: When Hanna is lying in the tent, talking to the teen girl from the camping family, I couldn't follow what was going on, because they were both lying down, facing each other, but the reverse shots didn't make any sense. Hanna was seen lying on her left side, and then when they cut to the shot of Sophie, she was ALSO lying down with the left side of her face on the ground. Then, umm, how were they talking to each other, and how did they kiss? This could only work if they maybe had their feet pointing in different directions, but that wasn't the case. The shot of Sophie should have showed her lying on her RIGHT side, and it was very distracting to me that she was not.
Also starring Saoirse Ronan (last seen in "Lady Bird"), Cate Blanchett (last seen in "Thor: Ragnarok"), Tom Hollander (last seen in "A Good Year"), Olivia Williams (last seen in "Lucky Break"), Jason Flemyng (last seen in "I Give It a Year"), Michelle Dockery (last seen in "Self/Less"), Jessica Barden (last seen in "The Lobster"), Aldo Maland, Vicky Krieps, Martin Wuttke (last seen in "Cloud Atlas"), Sebastian Hülk (last seen in "Red Sparrow"), Joel Basman, Gudrun Ritter, Jamie Beamish (last seen in "The Commuter").
RATING: 5 out of 10 shipping containers
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