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We must be entering some kind of golden age: Hit Girl, Mattie Ross, and now Hanna, and that's just in the last 12 months. Call them Buffy's Stepchildren: it's never been a better time to be a teenaged girl in a movie. You get to do everything.

Hanna, for example, can speak eight languages, render grown men unconscious with a single chop, and is no slouch with a compound bow. She balances these surpluses with sharply limited understandings of breakfast foods, lesbians who end up marrying men, and the concept of music, but one cannot learn everything while living in a cabin in the woods. This is where we find Hanna (Saoirse Ronan), sixteen years old, dressed in animal skins, and pale and ghostly as a misremembered poem.

Her father is Erik (Eric Bana), who has raised Hanna in isolation for the express purpose of, apparently, turning her into the perfect tool with which to assassinate Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett). Don't worry, Marissa deserves it, being a nastily dispassionate C.I.A. higher-up with some skeletons in her closet, including the murder of Hanna's mother. But does Hanna deserve it? Hanna is the fairy tale of this girl, who grows up in the forest and comes out into the real world, and then really grows up. As her emergence is propelled by a Chemical Brothers score and that all-around ability to shoot, kick, and sprint her way across whatever action set pieces are thrown against her, we quickly realize that Hanna's journey will be less about witches and wolves (though these are in evidence as well) than all-around badassery. Call it Run Hanna Run.

The film's successes rest almost entirely upon the spooky charm of Saoirse Ronan, which is not to undervalue the contributions of everyone else, but to properly value hers. With Hanna, Ronan marks her place as the strangest and most interesting actor in her age range. It's cruelly unfair that the girl who plays Hanna's friend, Sophie, is nowhere near Ronan's level; but then, with the exception of Blanchett, no one in the movie is. On the page, Hanna is so displaced from normal human behaviour that she might just as well be an alien, but Ronan's intense watchability carries the film. This role will flirt with icon status.

Director Joe Wright shoots the hell out of the picture, creating a wild, glittering landscape for Hanna to cross. He crafts a couple of long-take fight sequences which must be seen to be believed, including one where Erik is pursued into a subway concourse by five heavies, only to best them at hand-to-hand combat without a single cut, and another where Hanna turns the tables on a group of pursuers in a field of shipping containers. A critical flashback, shot just past magic hour and making extensive use of focus-limiting handheld camera, pulls Marissa, Erik, and Hanna's mother together with startling resonance. A touching scene between Hanna and her new best friend is made slightly uneasy with surreptitious violation of the axis-of-action rules of photography.

Meanwhile, repeated visual touchstones which continually reinforce, willy-nilly, the fairy tale undercarriage of the spy-thriller story. Hanna, standing in a trailer park, dressed as a princess off to the ball; Marissa, emerging from a wolf's mouth, gun in hand. A gunshot wound, late in the film, inevitably recalls the symbols of Red Riding Hood and her passage into adulthood. It doesn't add up to anything, being more a kind of seasoning in the soup than any real structure. But college students are going to be writing term papers about this for years, regardless.

Hanna is frosty and lacking in emotional access points, and something about the film overall feels like it doesn't quite "get there." It is nonetheless well-made and marvelously fun to watch. It fails to address the critical question of Hanna's desires, both physical and spiritual, preferring to dote instead on the microscopic ways in which Hanna slowly becomes a thinking, breathing person rather than a murderous automaton. She eventually sorts out the concept of music, at least. That's something.