After the costumed, Oscar nominated, drama-y successes of Pride & Prejudice, Atonement and to a lesser extent The Soloist*, Joe Wright is taking a very different turn for his next film, Hanna: an action-adventure-thriller story about a teenage assassin.
The plot sounds very much like the premise to the TV series Alias. Hanna is a 14 year-old Eastern European girl who has been raised to become a "cold-blooded killing machine". She finds a new life when she "connects" with a French family, and in particular befriends their daughter, but her father soon pulls her back into his world. She learns then that she was "bred as a killer in a CIA prison camp" (which shouldn't have come as much surprise given her previous training) and then tries to fight her way to freedom and a normal life.
The script was written by Seth Lochhead and David Farr, and has had a lot of buzz around it, with Danny Boyle and Alfonso Cuaron also interested at one point. We're told that the tone is something like La Femme Nikita meets the Bourne movies, which is...promising, but what the story sounds like is a darker, straighter take on Hit Girl in Kick-Ass.
Casting suggestions please! Dakota Fanning has got to be in with a shot, doesn't she?
*Well, it's less costume-y anyway. Whether it gets Oscar nominated remains to be seen.