Amazon Prime Video's latest offering, "Hanna," is based on the 2011 feature film starring Saoirse Ronan as a 16-year-old girl raised by her father to be the perfect assassin. She's unstoppable once released on her mission across Europe.
This Hanna, played in the streaming series launching Friday by relatively unknown British actor Esme Creed-Miles, was raised in a cave in the remote woods of Eastern Europe from infancy. Except for a logging cabin, the closest neighbor is 100 kilometers away. Her father, Erik Heller (Joel Kinnaman) has taught her survival skills and that the world is full of people who want to kill them. There is a fine line between educating and brainwashing her.
All that training comes in handy when the 15-year-old gets separated from her father after they are discovered by a rogue CIA operative, Marissa Wiegler (Mireille Enos), and her team of agents. Hanna sets out alone on a journey across Europe to reunite with her father and stop the people who have made them a target.
The series starts on the same action-packed footing, and both the star of the film and TV program are driven by their fathers to be killing machines while being secluded from the real world. Where the two begin to drift apart is that the feature film had some plot holes, but because everything played out in 111 minutes, some leeway was acceptable.
Amazon has ordered eight episodes for the first season, written by David Farr ("The Night Manager"), who knows the material because he was a co-writer on the film. Giving Farr eight episodes allows for more action and story but at the same time, it makes the film's flaws come across as more gaping.
The first two episodes reveal Hanna has been raised away from the outside world for 15 years. That's needed to give the character the kind of mad dog moments she slips into when her freedom is tested. It also sets up a lot of questions of how she and her father ended up with so many changes of clothes, where all the ammunition came from that Hanna uses so freely in testing her shooting skills and how they survived on a diet of meat with no fruit or vegetables in sight. These are nagging moments that chip away at the opening episode.
Questions begin to pile up in the second. Hanna finds herself in the outside world. There is some background material as to why Hanna can adapt so easily, but her casual acceptance of everything from cars to candy bars is just too convenient. Toss in that there are some heavy coming-of-age moments and the pure tale of survival gets watered down.
Hanna is special, but a little more wide-eyed reaction would have made more sense.
Farr stresses that 75 percent of the narrative in the TV series is completely new. The idea was not to make a reiteration of the feature film, but to go into new terrain to create a world with a bigger future. What he has written is a series that explores creation of young women that is scary against a backdrop of a unique political conspiracy.
Questions may surround the story, but there's nothing wrong with the casting of Creed-Miles. She steps up, whether in the fast-and-furious fights scenes or dealing with the lies Hanna's been made to memorize to give her a backstory in the real world. Creed-Miles easily slips from the inquisitive looks of a teen facing her first non-familial male contact to being a deadly assassin. There is a flow to her performance that makes the character interesting enough to distract from story problems.
Farr has plenty of time to deal with all the story questions, but some answers need to be provided sooner rather than later or interest in the series could fade. Until those blanks are filled in _ if they ever are _ "Hanna" is a proper adaptation of the feature film because of the casting of Creed-Miles and the well-staged action sequences.
There's plenty of time with eight episodes in the first season, and then there really isn't a lot of time, as "Hanna" is just the latest in a tsunami of original programs that keep battering the television coastline through over-the-air channels, traditional cable and streaming services. Viewing choices can change quickly.
