Last Saturday, we watched the movie Hanna. The title character is a girl who lives deep in a forest north of the Arctic Circle with her dad, who teaches her how to hunt reindeer, gut them, cook them and eat them, and oh yes he occasionally also sneaks up on her and tries to kill her.

Dad teaches Hanna about the outside world by reading from encyclopedias by the firelight. He also tells her about Marissa, a woman who will stop at nothing to kill Hanna. Then they go to bed, and dad tries to kill Hanna in her sleep.

Dad’s preparing Hanna for the day that she will meet Marissa, you see. In their forest hut they have been able to live safely for years, but Dad has carefully hidden a radio beacon that will tell Marissa where they are, and one day he gives it to Hanna, I guess as sort of a birthday present, and of course Hanna switches it on, because why would she think it was a strange idea to call a homicidal killer and say, “Hey, I’m here!” It’s not that odd, really, when you keep in mind that she’s living with a dad who keeps trying to kill her, right?

As it turns out, Marissa’s an agent in the CIA. She calls a meeting of all the big-time CIA agents where they sits around a big, circular table in a room the size of the Rose Bowl, surrounded by dozens of flat-screen TVs that all have the same picture of Hanna’s killer psycho dad on them. Release the hounds! they say, and in the next scene dozens of storm troopers in white jump suits are running through the forest toward the hut where Hanna lives. Her dad escapes, but they take Hanna back to a secret underground lair for questioning. Then she goes all Jason Bourne on them and escapes, too, effortlessly killing every one of the armed guards who tries to stop her.

Hanna finds her way out of the secret underground CIA lair and emerges from a manhole in the middle of a desert. She walked across miles of trackless waste until the heat starts to get to her and it looks as though she might have to do the scene where she falls face-down in the sand and the vultures start circling, but then a young girl Hanna couldn’t see because the sun was behind her starts mouthing the most tortuously improbable lines uttered by any young girl in any movie ever, and it looks instead like Hanna’s going to do the scene where she hallucinates and wakes up buckled into a chair back in the secret underground CIA lair.

But it turns out the girl is on vacation with her brother, and the rest of her family is in a camper just over the top of the hill, and they all ride off together to a city in Africa where Hanna tells them thanks for the ride, then wanders through the city all by herself, a little blond white girl in a city where there are no little blond white girls, or even any girls, walking around all by themselves. Not only does nobody seem to think this is strange, but nobody, and I mean not a single person so much as glances in her direction. And when she walks into the lobby of a shop of some sort and asks the owner if he has a room she can stay in for the night, and tells him she doesn’t have any money to pay for it, the guy just ups and gives her a room, no questions asked.

All this to say, Hanna is a very weird movie. There’s never any explanation for why the CIA agent, Marissa, wants to kill Hanna and her dad. She just does. There’s no explaining how she gets away with commanding the enormous resources of the Agency to hunt down this one girl. There’s one very weird scene where Marissa is brushing her teeth so vigorously that she’s making her gums bleed. I guess that’s supposed to make her seem a lot more scary than if she just decided to kill Hanna on a whim.

So watch it if you want to, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.