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Director Joe Wright has developed some serious cred when it comes to dramas with Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, and this past April's The Soloist.  However, none of those films had a fourteen year old girl killing lots of people, although I certainly wanted lots of people to kill the fourteen year old girl in Atonement (not the actress, but the character).  Wright will throw a serious change-up into his filmography with Hanna, an action-adventure film described as a mix of La Femme Nikita and the Bourne films*.  However, the protagonist's nationality is more Nikita and the people she's fighting look more like Jason Bourne.  Hit the jump for more details.

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Wright was originally slated to direct the period drama Indian Summer, starring Cate Blanchett.  However, as the budget ballooned and the filmmakers realized that period dramas aren't exactly smash hits at the box office, they put the project on hold.  Making a radical departure from his past films, Wright signed on to direct Hanna.  Here's how Heat Vision describes it:

The story centers on a 14-year-old Eastern European girl who has been raised by her father to be a cold-blooded killing machine. She connects with a French family, forms a friendship with their daughter and goes through the pangs of adolescence. When the girl is dragged back to her father's world and discovers that she was bred as a killing machine in a CIA prison camp, she must fight her way to a free life.

Ah, junior high.

I'm sure Hanna will be a huge hit because U.S. audiences go nuts when an Eastern European protagonist goes off on a bunch of CIA agents.  Crap, I got that backwards.  Never mind.

All kidding aside, I like these change-ups.  Even though I consider Atonement to be an awful movie, Wright has some serious directing chops and I also like the decision of making the hero of a movie a young European actress rather than someone like Miley Cyrus or some other Disney Channel sensation.

*I've been trying to see how long I can go reporting news without an upcoming film comparing itself to the Bourne movies.