One of the central problems with Hollywood, one of many obviously, is it never wants an intellectual property to sit dormant. Franchises have to keep churning out product and earn their keep even if that franchise or character has been bungled, poorly received, and just needs a rest away from audiences. With the advent of streaming, Hollywood found another way to keep brands and I.P. going and going, another revenue stream as it were: reconstitute all decent film ideas as long-form TV series that can keep running into oblivion. That doesn’t always give you five-star properties, but a decent genre film these days can easily have a second life on TV. Hence, Joe Wright‘s high concept action-thriller/ coming of age tale, “Hanna” starring Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana, and Cate Blanchett from 2011, about a sixteen-year-old girl who was raised by her father to be the perfect assassin and dispatched on a mission across Europe, tracked by a ruthless intelligence agent and her operatives.
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The thinking man’s action movie inspired by the ‘Jason Bourne‘ series, “Hanna” didn’t change the world or the spy genre, but it was an engaging enough thriller that even used its loss-of-innocence themes to twist the film into a quasi fairy tale. Amazon has taken a grittier approach, more akin to the original ‘Bourne’ in their spin-off.
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The series reconstituted its lead roles with stars newcomer Esme Creed-Miles, Joel Kinnaman, and Mireille Enos, but essentially the same setup, the young girl, the father that trains her, and the deadly CIA operative who wants her dead.
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Big spoiler, Joel Kinnaman’s father character died at the end of Season 1, sort of inevitable, really. So Creed-Miles is on her own this season but is recruited into a boarding school for young killers called the Meadows. Here’s the official Season 2 synopsis:
Welcome to the Meadows, a secret conditioning school where assassins are trained to go undercover as everyday teenage girls. But a former test subject, Hanna, returns to infiltrate the facility and put an end to this shadowy organization. They took her father. They took her identity. But can they stop her?
Watch the official trailer now for “Hanna” below, the new season premieres July 3, only on Amazon Prime Video.
