Saoirse Ronan's Next Film, Hanna
Back in November, I read this article about director Joe Wright: "He's got his eye on Hanna, a spy thriller about someone resembling the teenage girl version of Jason Bourne. Oh yes, such an awesome movie can actually exist, particularly with someone as in tune with girl power as Wright directing. Given that Chloe Moretz seems likely to wow us at Hit Girl in Kick-Ass, we may be facing some kind of new era of teenage girl badasses. Some teen actress is about to get a seriously big break."
I've been wondering since then who might be cast as the title character in Hanna, and since Saoirse Ronan wrapped her last film The Way Back, I was also wondering what role she might take on next. I never thought that those two questions would answer each other. But they did. It's been confirmed that Saoirse will play the title character in Hanna, which is tentatively set for release in 2012.
Here's a synopsis of the film: The story centers around a 14-year-old Eastern European girl who has been raised by her father to be a cold-blooded killing machine. Then she connects with a French family, befriends their daughter, and experiences a normal life and the pangs of adolescence. When the girl is dragged back to her father’s world and realizes that she was bred as a killing machine in a CIA prison camp, she must fight her way to a free life.
Hanna (like Kick-Ass, to which it will certainly be compared) looks like a case of shock value, which sometimes leads to shallow shock value -- pushing the envelope just for the sake of it, provoking a reaction but not saying anything significant. It's the worst disease to plague young actress films, and what I hate most is that so many people think that shock value of any kind (shallow or not) instantly makes a great movie. The above article assumes Hanna will be "an awesome movie" just because it has a teen girl assassin. I think some people get off on such an image.
But it's true that shock value doesn't always lead to shallow shock value, because sometimes a film will put actual substance beneath the shock. So I'll keep an open mind about Hanna (and yes, Kick-Ass too, although from what I've seen, it doesn't look very good) and assume that it might be such a film. From the synopsis, Hanna does seem to take a more serious approach to the idea of a child trained to kill, unlike the fun, cool attitude of Kick-Ass.
And I have to say that this is what makes Abigail Breslin my favorite young actress of today. While other young girls have played murder victims (Saoirse Ronan), rape victims (Dakota Fanning), child assassins (Chloe Moretz), and other dramatic and mature roles, Abigail's happy to bring an American Girl doll to life, or do a movie about a girl who lives on a tropical island and gets to play with sea lions and slide down waterfalls. In other words, she acts her age! While I have nothing against the young actress who do mature movies -- although this post probably sounds like I do -- it's so refreshing to see one who doesn't take herself so seriously. We need more actresses like Abigail.