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.

The Lovely Bones sees Peter Jackson returning to Heavenly Creatures territory. His latest film deals with adolescence and murder, and once again it allows his imagination to cut loose. But while Heavenly Creatures featured a fantasy world that was the creation of the characters, The Lovely Bones spends a lot of time in purgatory and heaven.

I wish I could say that the sequences with the dead Susie Salmon are engaging and well realized, but they get submerged in an avalanche of CGI. Landscapes continually change and Susie waltzes through her new world but at no time does the environment feel tangible. It never feels like you could reach out and touch it. But at the same time it doesn’t feel otherworldly. It’s a bunch of poorly rendered, idyllic locations on earth that are supposed to resemble heaven because of their perfection. But rather than go to the real places and film, Jackson instead uses lots and lots of greenscreen – and bad greenscreen at that.

Some of the imagery is also trite. There’s a bit where Susie and her friend come to grips with their new reality and begin enjoying themselves. They prance through fields, pretend they’re famous and even play on a floating planet that is about as big as a wrecking ball. The last image in particular looked ridiculous. All of a sudden it was like I was playing Super Mario Galaxy – the visuals are exactly the same.

The purgatory/heaven scenes also aren’t helped by Susie’s friend – a comedic Asian girl. Her performance resembles a titmouse that’s inhaled helium – she jitters back and forth while squeaking in a baby voice. It’s cringe-worthy.

Another risible character is that of Susie’s grandmother. Again she’s meant to provide some light relief, but she just made me roll my eyes. She’s a shallow drunkard with a heart of gold – the kind of woman who makes her grandchildren do chores for her while she naps with a glass of bourbon in her hand. People like this aren’t secretly wise and they’re not endearing. They’re losers and they’re windbags. They don’t have golden nuggets of information to share with you in your darkest hours – they just want to raid the liquor cabinet. And there’s even a scene where the grandmother does just that – while giving advice she searches the cabinets for booze. It’s meant to be endearing but the character is far too shallow and glib to generate any warmth.

Going back to Susie, though, the film is more successful when the dead girl interacts with the real world. There’s a nice scene where her father sees a candle and the reflection in the window differs from the reality he sees before his eyes. He senses that it’s Susie’s spirit trying to communicate with him. And there’s another scene where a dead rose blooms in his hand and he suddenly knows who the killer is. It’s in these scenes where the fantastic feels like an organic part of the story, rather than an excuse to indulge in dodgy CGI.

Another moment I enjoyed was when a local girl sees the spirit of Susie running through the street at the point that she’s murdered. It’s one of the few really good visuals in the film. Compare this with the moment where the dead Susie sees the reflection of her lost love in the lake. Hackneyed and schmaltzy, it kind of reminded me of a moment in Bitter Moon – however, in that film, I think the moment was played for laughs.

But while Susie’s interactions with the real world mostly work, there’s a truly execrable scene near the end. You see, Susie was in love with a guy called Ray and this Ray bloke is now friends with the girl who saw Susie’s ghost as she was being murdered. So they’re hanging out and then Susie’s spirit possesses the other girl and Ray and Susie kiss. It’s incredibly silly – Ray suddenly sees Susie in the other girl’s clothes and then she lays on the bed and asks him to kiss her. Even though she’s meant to be about fourteen she looks about twelve (he looks much older). Thankfully it’s not as icky as the equivalent scene in the novel but it still doesn’t work. I mean, how fucked up is it that a girl gets possessed by another girl and then gets boned? Couldn’t that be considered rape? It’s certainly not romantic.

Speaking of the adaptation, the murder here pales in comparison to the scene in the novel. What makes the murder so jarring in the book is how brutal it is. I mean, most of the book is pretty awful but the murder scene is superbly written. It doesn’t hold back and the murderer even rapes the poor girl. But the worst detail of all is the fact that the killer, to shut her up, shoves the girl’s hat in her mouth – a hat that has a jangle bell in it. The equivalent scene here, though, is sanitized – in order to get a PG-13 rating they’ve taken away the rape and taken away the jangle bell. They’ve made it far less shocking and thusly reduced its impact – the sense of outrage and injustice isn’t as intense as it was.

The filmmakers have also reduced the complexity of the relationship between mother and father. In the novel the mother has an affair with the police detective who leads the investigation. Here she just goes off because she can’t cope with her daughter’s death. To be fair, the affair didn’t really work and was terribly written but at least it was an attempt at adding some complexity to the story. Here, though, the filmmakers keep everything as simple as possible. I guess they thought it was a better idea to focus on Susie prancing about in a crappy CGI environment than to show how complicated grief is.

But it’s amazing how the film can be so long and yet the story can be so incredibly thin. Once Susie is killed, very little happens. There’s only one real suspense sequence – Susie’s sister suspects Mr Harvey of being the murderer and breaks into his place in order to find some incriminating evidence. Would you believe it, he comes back while she’s in the house and chases her. In order to escape, she jumps out of a window and seemingly badly injures herself. Oh no, he’s going to catch her as she writhes about on the floor! But when he closes to about a foot away from her, she jumps up and manages to outrun him. It’s incredibly badly choreographed.

I also think that the ending is incredibly anti-climatic. Just like in the novel, Mr Harvey is trying to pick up a girl so that he can kill her and an icicle falls and kills him. It’s divine justice and it’s supposed to show that what goes around comes around, but it’s an unsatisfying way of dispatching the main villain. Firstly it seems far too offhand and secondly, it’s dishonest – there’s no karmic justice in the world; shitty people get away with things and if they’re brought to justice it’s because they either fucked up or people worked hard to apprehend them. You can’t count on icicles falling from the sky.