HANNA is a tough sell – an intelligent, deliberately paced action thriller with a young female protagonist, helmed by a director famed for his Keira Knightley period dramas. HANNA is pretty much the antithesis of Zack Snyder’s SUCKER PUNCH. While that film was interested solely in the shiny surface of its central conceit – pretty young things wrestling video game villains – HANNA actively encourages its audience to sympathise with its tortured central character – rather than merely get a peek up her skirt.

Wright has already proven himself an impressive creative force behind the camera, conjuring profound visual and aural landscapes upon which to hang the drama. Applied to a series of intense action sequences, the director presents his audience with thrills that not only excite and engage, but also impress with their carefully considered aesthetics. HANNA is a beautiful film to look at, and thanks to the musical dexterity of British electo duo the Chemical Brothers, it is also tantalizing on the ears.

But Wright’s talents are not all smoke and mirrors, he is also highly adept at teasing out emotionally complex performances not often warranted in this particular genre. Saoirse Ronan proves, as she did in Peter Jackson’s THE LOVELY BONES, that she can happily carry the weight of an adult motion picture on her slight, yet sturdy shoulders. Hanna reveals herself to be lethal yet vulnerable, competent yet dangerously naïve when tossed out into the real world. Her father (Eric Bana) – a former spy now living in exile – has raised her to live by the mantra “adapt or die”, which is repeatedly tested by Cate Blanchett’s steely CIA officer and a menagerie of deadly European operatives who descend upon her. Schooled in weapons, martial arts and survival tactics, Hanna discovers that there is more to life than discipline & death – and perhaps more to her than the petite assassin she has been raised to be.

Growing up in the woodland wilderness, Hanna’s only entertainment was a collection of Grimm’s Fairytales and when her father instructs her to meet him at Grimm’s house in Berlin it seems a smart, if obvious, call back on the part of the writers. As more of Hanna’s backstory is revealed, however, it becomes apparent that Wright and screenwriter Seth Lochhead’s allusions to these classic children’s stories go much deeper, and the film culminates in a confrontation staged quite literally in the jaws of the big bad wolf. Arriving in Hong Kong sandwiched between SUCKER PUNCH and Catherine Hardwicke’s campy retelling of RED RIDING HOOD, Joe Wright’s HANNA has a fight on its hands to pull in an audience, but those it attracts will be heartily rewarded, as it offers up a heroine who is both formidable and fearsome, without acquiescing to some adolescent, fetishistic fantasy.