Another one from my Amazon wish list to be bought when it's cheap enough which I'm glad I did finally get round to albeit not as much as RED (see previous post).
In a nutshell, ex-spy Eric Bana raises his daughter(?) Saoirse Ronan in an unspecified tundra region to be a ruthless assassin. His aim: to get her to kill his ex-handler Cate Blanchett. Now adolescent, Bana allows Ronan to decide when she wants to start. Having decided, a signal is sent out, Bana leaves, and Ronan allows herself to be captured. What follows after that is a hunt for both of them across North Africa and Europe during the course of which Ronan begins to learn about being human..
Saoirse Ronan is just bloody amazing, easily as good as flavour of the month Jennifer Laurence in The Hunger Games. Cate Blanchett is superb -I know, who'd have thought?- as the frighteningly scary ruthless enemy. The rest of the cast is great too -the aforementioned Bana, Tom Hollander, Jason Flemyng, and Olivia Williams.
Only problem is, I didn't believe a word of it. There's a massive high-tech underground American spy complex in the Moroccan desert. Blanchett uses a bunch of shaven headed (implicitly Nazi) thugs run by deadly but sexually ambivalent Tom Hollander. An amiable British family with parents (Flemyng & Williams) who are so liberal they'd take in a girl in early adolescence who's travelling alone rather than dropping her at the door of the nearest appropriate embassy. I just couldn't suspend my disbelief.
I enjoyed it all right because of the quality of the filmmaking, the excellent cast, and the pace of the thing, but there's a whopping great but. One thing I am sure, Ronan is already an extremely accomplished actor who'll be gracing cinema screens for years to come and I wouldn't bet against her winning an Oscar some day.
Just a thought: I bet she'd have been terrific in the lead of The Hunger Games.
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