The ass-kicking chick flicks are getting more and more ridiculous as time goes on. In “Hanna” a girl is raised by her father to be a vicious killer somewhere in the arctic. Hanna is played by Saoirse Ronan, an Irish girl with a sweet smile who looks about as tough as a bunny rabbit. Nevertheless, we are supposed to suspend disbelief and accept that this waif is capable of breaking necks with a single blow.
As a father myself, the last thing I want to raise my daughter to be is a stone-cold killer, a job most girls are entirely incapable of in any event. One funny part of the trailer shows Hanna doing pull-ups with her father. In general, women can’t do pull-ups, and the vanishingly few who can don’t look much like Saoirse Ronan.
I know there were a few action shows about women in the 1970s, such as Wonder Woman and The Bionic Woman, but the genre seems to have really taken off some time in the 90s. I attribute this in part to the Hong Kong action flicks, which often feature female fighters. However, a major difference between the HK movies and the Western ones is that the good guys in HK movies often beat the crap out of bad female characters. Another thing is that these movies in China were an outgrowth of Chinese opera, which features a great deal of dancing and gymnastics that require years of training to master. The Western heroines are jokes in that regard — none has anything even close to the athleticism of a real Chinese martial arts actor.
