Ever wondered what a British arthouse action film would feel like? Wait no more, for we have Hanna, possibly one of the most peculiar action films ever made.

There’s nothing particularly original in this movie. Thrown in some Bourne Identity, add some La Femme Nikita and sprinkle with everything from Leon to A Clockwork Orange to Mission: Impossible to Batman Begins to the James Bond movies to Grimms’ fairytales. This is a film with lots of influences.

Sadly, Hanna doesn’t rise beyond its ambitions. It desperately wants to be an arthouse actioner. It wants to shake the genre up and defy its tired conventions by making a quasi fairytale thriller. But although its beautiful to look at and although its reasonably well acted, it’s also a messy, shallow, cold, sterile, mean-spirited film. I’ve seen a great many movies that are more hard-edged than this but few have felt so grubby.

Violence in films rarely bothers me but here it’s particularly manipulative and pointless. It doesn’t advance the story and it doesn’t really tell us anything about the characters. People are tortured and stabbed and shot just to keep us on our toes and to show that the characters committing the acts are badasses that aren’t to be messed with. Cate Blanchett shoots a defenceless old lady, Tom Hollander stabs an Arab in the neck, Eric Bana kills a couple of cops etc. etc.

The scene with the old lady is particularly baffling. You see, Hanna was part of a CIA plan to create genetically altered super soldiers. The plan was a failure and everyone involved was killed. The only people to escape were Hanna and her surrogate father, Erik, played by Eric Bana. Turns out that the old lady is Hanna’s grandmother and she knows all about the secret plan. Quite why she wasn’t rubbed out beforehand, I’m not sure. But killing her now seems particularly stupid. Keep her under surveillance and she might unwittingly lead you to the girl. But no, she’s shot in the head to give the audience a jolt.

Part of the reason that everything is so broad and over the top is that it obviously wants to be a modern day fairytale. Marissa (Cate Blanchett) is the wicked witch/big bad wolf while Hanna is a demented Snow White/Red Riding Hood, living relatively peacefully in her ridiculously idyllic cabin in the woods. But there are no layers to this film. I never really felt that Hanna grew as a character. She started off as a functional psychopath and ended the film slightly less psycho. Indeed, it’s actually annoying that when she eventually says that she no longer wants to kill people - it’s when Cate Blanchett is pointing a gun at her. Now is not the time to find the peace and love in you.

The mid-section of Hanna certainly doesn’t help the film. Hanna gets taken in by a hippie family that seem more dysfunctional than Hanna and her surrogate father (note: Hanna and her father randomly fight in the middle of night to test Hanna’s combat readiness). These hippies argue and twitter on about a load of nonsense. Joe Wright is trying to make them seem like a believably complex family unit, but they come over as cliches. These are the type of people that you would cross the street to avoid if you were holidaying in Europe. And the family’s daughter is repellent. She’s a spoilt little princess who loves to discuss fake boobs and designer bags. Of course there’s meant to be more to her than this - she’s meant to have hidden depths - but I didn’t want Hanna to learn anything from her; I think she’s better off remaining as the Fuhrer’s wet dream (a blonde, Germanic, genetically-enhanced assassin).

And this kills the heart of the film. Through experience and exposure to the beauties of the outside world, Hanna is meant to find her humanity. But what’s out there? Squabbling hippies and posh chavs? Get back to that cabin, Hanna!

I was also disappointed at the failure to flesh out Eric Bana’s character. Effectively, he’s training Hanna to exert revenge on Marissa - Marissa attempted to kill Erik and successfully killed Hanna’s mother. But the character is two dimensional. Plus he’s a key part in two of the film’s hokiest moments.

Hokey Moment Number One: As Hanna’s psycho-Yoda trainer/protector, he decides that the girl is ‘ready’. He then brings out a great big transmitter that will alert the world to their presence. This is really the best way of doing things? Rather than just track down Marissa and quietly rub her out, you’re going to send your ‘daughter’ into the lion’s den? And is it really wise to keep a big transmitter like that lying around? Say you accidentally sat on it in the middle of the night, or Hanna found it and pressed it, or one of your wolf cubs set it off?

Hokey Moment Number Two: Erik is being tracked by government agents. They confront him in a subway station. It’s only Erik against four people. Rather than shoot him in the kneecaps with a silenced pistol or just outright shoot him in the head, they decide to take him on in hand-to-hand combat. Of course, even though these guys are well trained, he manages to kill all of them. Idiots.

On the flipside of this, I really enjoyed the flashback where we see Marissa try and assassinate Erik and Hanna’s mother. It has a weird, dreamlike quality to it. It also shows how inept Blanchett’s character is. She tries to stop a car with a Walther PPK! By some miracle she manages to do this and she shoots Hanna’s mum in the head. But even though it’s slightly ridiculous, it works. You get the feeling that this a woman out of her depth but ruthlessly committed to what she’s doing. There’s purpose behind it, which is the polar opposite of the scene with the grandmother.

But although Blanchett is excellent in this scene, she’s pretty lacklustre in the movie as a whole. She chews the scenery like crazy, obviously enjoying the opportunity to play the part of the wicked witch. But there’s nothing subtle about it. There’s even one bit, towards the end, where we see her scowling through the window like she’s literally the Big Bad Wolf. And her American accent is terrible.

However, one detail about Blanchett’s character that I liked: at one point we see a row of dental equipment and then we see Marissa manically cleaning her teeth. She’s cleaning them so hard that her teeth are bleeding. She’s fighting hard to keep her exterior perfect and clean while the inside of her is diseased and rotten. She must remain the fairest of them all, no matter what.

All the Snow White, Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel with guns nonsense concludes with Hanna, an expert assassin, being chased through through a fairytale land by an inept Scary Witch. Really, Hanna should be able to kill her in two seconds, but this would be an anti-climax, so we have a ridiculous face-off where Hanna and Marissa shoot each other (although, to try and make things more creative, Hanna somehow shoots an arrow out of her elbow like she’s MacGuyver). The film ends with a massive whimper.

The one bright spot in this massive folly is Tom Hollander. He’s wonderfully creepy as Isaac, a German killer who has the hair and clothes (although not stature) of a deranged Ken doll. Yes the script doesn’t give his character any depth or complexity, but at least it affords Hollander the chance to show another side of himself. He’s the one positive note in a movie that rings completely hollow.

Based upon a not-so-great novel, The Time Traveler’s Wife manages to improve upon the source material, but only slightly. This isn’t a Jaws or a Godfather – mediocre novels that were stripped bare and resurrected as cinematic masterpieces by visionary filmmakers. Instead we have an extremely minor improvement – we’re talking fractions.

Audrey Niffenegger’s novel was a case of someone’s ambition exceeding their talent. The premise behind the story was excellent but the execution left a lot to be desired. At times the characters were bad tempered and thoroughly unlikable and there was also a lot of queasy sexual content. Thankfully most of that has been erased from the film. But not all of it.

The most dubious part of the film is the first time that Henry (Eric Bana) and Clare (Rachel McAdams) make love. Henry has only known this woman for a couple of hours but the woman already knows him quite well. She knows him because an older version of him travelled back in time and befriended her when she was a child. So they make love and then we cut to their first meeting. Somehow the juxtaposition of mind-blowing sex and a child’s picnic seems slightly wrong. Yes, the filmmakers try and make everything seem as sweet and innocent as possible, but we’ve just watched these two characters screw. And so no matter how cute the filming is, it’s going to seem wrong to watch a child be confronted with a naked man in a bush with the knowledge that they’re going to be lovers.

And wouldn’t this be weird for Henry? Remember, he already knows that he’s going to sleep with an adult version of this girl. This is his future wife. Wouldn’t it be a bit strange to be confronted with a child version of his lover? Apparently not. He doesn’t display any awkwardness at all. I know that if I was confronted with a child version of my wife I’d be extremely self-conscious…and not just because she couldn’t speak English when she was six years-old.

But back to the first sex scene. Another reason why it doesn’t work is because Henry has only known this girl for a few hours. Sure she tells him a bunch of stuff and talks to him about his time travelling, but he seems far too willing to jump in the sack with her. Unlike Clare, his feelings seem to be motivated by lust rather than by love – she has years of emotional investment in him; he only has a couple of hours.

I also don’t like how the two main characters seemingly don’t have any free will. All of their decisions are already made for them by all the crazy time travelling that Henry does – he’s destined to fall in love with Clare and she’s destined to marry him and they’re destined to have a child and they’re destined to call it Alba. With everything pre-arranged, you kind of wonder what’s the point?

Clare even makes a joke about her lack of choice. When Henry asks to marry her, she says no. She says that she’s exercising her free will. But then she says yes. It’s such an awful piece of dialogue and such a clumsy piece of acting that the lack of choice for the characters becomes even more startling. These people just seem to be going through the motions.

Of course there are attempts to provide some conflict. At one point Henry misses Christmas and Clare has to open her presents on her own. But her unwillingness to talk to him once he comes back seems incredibly petty. She knows that her husband can disappear at any time and she seems to have tolerated it quite well up until this point. Consequently she comes over as a bitch.

Another reason why I didn’t like the character that much. Clare and Henry make several attempts to have a child. However, the unborn children seem to have the same problem that Henry has – they time travel (therefore, somewhere in the past or in the future, a foetus just appeared out of nowhere – how charming). Knowing what distress this is causing him and his wife, Henry decides to have a vasectomy. Aha, he’s exercising his free will. Oh, but then the angry wife decides to fuck a younger version of Henry (who has time travelled to Clare’s present) and gets impregnated in the back of a beige Volvo. She says this isn’t cheating, but I’m not sure. But even if it isn’t, it’s fairly despicable. Okay, your husband should have told you that he was getting snipped, but a grudge fuck with a younger version of him is pretty bad. And then getting pregnant too and saying ‘fuck you’ to a decision he’s tried to make for your mutual benefit smacks of selfishness in the extreme.

But then Clare’s behaviour often smacks of selfishness. After a couple of miscarriages, she ridicules the idea of adopting a child. She wants to have Henry’s child and nothing else will do. Okay, but isn’t she dooming her offspring with the same dismal fate as her husband? As my wife pointed out, what’s she’s doing is no better than when people decide to have a child even though they’re aware that there’s a good chance they’re going to give them some crippling genetic disorder. She’s an idiot.

However, the couple, thanks to a young Henry, eventually manage to have a child. The moppet in question is exceedingly cute and time travels as well. Well done, Clare. Well done.

The end of the film is a shameless attempt to pull on your heartstrings, but because the story is so overwhelmingly manipulative, it didn’t work for me. You see, Henry time travels and then loses the use of his legs. He then has to go about in a wheelchair, fearful of his next time travelling venture, as he probably won’t survive it. Eventually he’s transported to the meadow where he met his wife when she was a child. Now, though, it’s winter and he gets shot. But he doesn’t get shot by just anyone. He gets shot by his wife’s father (he’s a Republican hunter type, kind of like Dick Cheney but more deadly with a gun). It’s a total accident but Henry is now dead meat and dies soon after. It’s kind of a ridiculous way to die.

But when you think that the film has thankfully come to an end, there’s a scene where Henry visits his daughter and bereaved wife. It’s supposed to be heart warming (the wife runs through the meadow to embrace her husband before he disappears) but in reality it seems kind of awful. Rather than move on, are these characters doomed to wait around for the odd visit from a dead Henry? If it’s supposed to leave you with a warm, tingly feeling in your guttiwuts, it fails dismally.