Like a lot of TV shows based on films, the first season of Amazon Prime’s “Hanna” struggled to escape the shadow of the Joe Wright action movie on which it was based. For one, Wright’s take on adolescent Jason Bourne took on fanciful dimensions of coming of age fables and fairy tales, and “Hanna” the show had no such color to differentiate it from the skeleton idea of a teenage assassin and the CIA operatives hunting her down. When it wasn’t hitting many of the same narrative beats as its source, it was leading viewers to wonder what even justified its existence. Yet, the end of Season 1 gave fans hope that “Hanna” could stand on its own two legs in its sophomore year, free to expand instead of just replicate.
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At the beginning of Season 2, it feels like creator David Farr and his team are exuberantly going to finally do just that: make this “Hanna” their own, acting as free as their heroine. And there are times throughout the entire season when they do put their own stamp on the original concept, but too often, the pacing continues to sag, and the show’s title character remains a frustrating enigma. The show may bear her name, but it too often feels like “Hanna” has no idea what to do with her.
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Much like the 2011 film, Amazon’s “Hanna” is the story of a young girl raised in the wilderness by her father, who kidnapped her from a covert operation to turn babies into killing machines. Played by Esme Creed-Miles, Hanna left the forest in the first season, sending both her father Erik (Joel Kinnaman) and his former boss Marissa (Mireille Enos) after her. The Season 1 episodes form a sort of coming-of-age action movie with a title character learning things about the world she’s never seen (Texting! Drinking! Boys!) in between opportunities to show off her wicked fighting skills. The first batch of episodes culminates in a return to Utrax, the facility from which Erik kidnapped Hanna when she was just a baby, and the revelation that the program had been restarted after both Erik and Marissa left it. In a violent finale, Erik ended up shot and killed, but Hanna escaped with another teen girl fighter named Clara (Yasmin Monet Prince). She was sent to the woods again, this time the teacher instead of student.
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The second season opens not long after the end of the first. Hanna and Clara are on the run while Marissa is being debriefed about exactly what happened at Utrax by a slimy new boss named John Carmichael (Dermot Mulroney, who has always done the slimy boss thing well), who runs a facility called The Meadows, training super soldiers to hide in plain sight in the real world. In between war games and lessons about civil unrest, the girls live out another coming-of-age teen narrative—this time at a boarding school, complete with rivalries, budding friendships, and brainwashing. Both Hanna and Clara will find themselves sucked back into the web of Utrax and the Meadows, where the show introduces new teenage super soldiers like the charming Sandy (Áine Rose Daly) and the cynical Jules (Gianna Kiehl). At times, the series feels like “Girl, Interrupted” crossed with “Atomic Blonde.”
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Of course, training schools for young female killers aren’t exactly new ground for films and TV series, and Season 2 of “Hanna” recalls everything from “La Femme Nikita” to “Red Sparrow,” albeit with a few modern, almost YA twists. The most thematically interesting is the subplot about an employee at the Meadows who pretends to be a “mother” for each of the girls, responding to letters and text messages in that role and assisting with the copious brainwashing. Even when the teenagers know in their hearts the person on the other end isn’t really their biological parent, they respond as if she is, highlighting how much people will do anything for a support structure, even if they know it’s hollow. It’s also an interesting idea for training spies-to-be who will have to someday sell a convincing cover story not just to everyone else but themselves.
What’s problematic about the new episodes of “Hanna” is the sense that the series doesn’t quite know what to do with its title character or even Enos’ Marissa, a woman now burned by everyone and uncertain of where her loyalties should lie. The lack of depth within Hanna in the first season could be explained by her confusion and panic over being thrust into a world she had only been told about by her father, but the opportunity to have her really drive Season 2 simply isn’t taken. Even the writers seem more interested in characters like Sandy and John, leaving Hanna and Marissa as plot devices more than actual people. There’s a mother-daughter dynamic between the two that’s hinted at but woefully underdeveloped.
It doesn’t help too much that the new season lacks urgency. Once again, the eight-hour length leads the writers of “Hanna” to pad the episodes’ runtimes as there is constant talk about the deadly skills of its characters and the intensity of their predicament without actually conveying either narratively until the final arc. To be blunt, a show about embedded teen assassins should be more fun than “Hanna,” a program that takes itself too seriously by half without enough dramatic heft to back it up. It too often feels like it doesn’t have enough to say about teenage girlhood—some of the dialogue at the Meadows is incredibly awkward (although possibly intentionally given the bubble in which these characters were raised)—and isn’t intense or entertaining enough as a spy action thriller until around episode seven.
Much like Season 1, the new episodes of “Hanna” open promisingly and close with a bang. As seen in other streaming series, it’s the slack in the middle that frustrates. If the first season of “Hanna” left viewers hoping they would build on their idea with a more ambitious and entertaining second year, that same feeling hangs in the air at the end of Season 2 after a confident season finale—the first and last episodes of each season are their individual best, often feeling like obviously where the writers started breaking out the year and then worked back to figure out how to stretch the middle six chapters. The new additions like Sandy and John are more than welcome in that Daly and Mulroney are both often very good. And now that 16 episodes have been spent setting up this dynamic of socially maladjusted killing machines, maybe the third season is where they’re unleashed in an entertaining way? That is, if audiences stick around long enough to care or find out. [C]
