While one Prime Video action thriller series blended the spy craft of the Jason Bourne movies with the teen heroine of Stranger Things, the show still lasted only two seasons on the streaming service. Although spy shows have always been popular, they are not always an easy genre to pull off. Admittedly, the success of Mission: Impossible, Get Smart, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E during the ‘60s, at the height of the James Bond franchise’s popularity, started the small-screen genre out strong.

However, in the decades since, spy shows have waxed and waned in popularity from decade to decade. Even depending on the streaming service, spy shows like Apple TV’s Slow Horses can become huge hits, while Prime Video’s more expensive, starrier Citadel franchise turned out to be a misguided investment for the streamer. Similarly, Netflix’s Jason Bourne-inspired The Night Agent was a huge success, but the same streaming service’s Noah Centineo vehicle The Recruit lasted only two seasons before its abrupt cancellation.

Within this context of mixed critical responses and commercial performances, it makes sense that one Prime Video show opted to blend an espionage story worthy of the Jason Bourne movies with a coming-of-age mystery that borrowed from Netflix’s massively popular Stranger Things. This combination could seem ill-fated, but 2019’s Hanna, an action thriller starring Esme Creed-Miles as the titular teenage assassin, perfectly pitted the two plots against each other.

Hanna Turns Stranger Things’ Eleven Into A Bourne-Style Super Spy

Like Jason Bourne, Hanna was part of a secret government program that turned her into an unstoppable assassin, only for the CIA to then not only shut down the program, but order another agent to kill all of its subjects. Like Bourne, Hanna used her enhanced killing abilities to not only survive once she escaped, but to evade capture and death at the hands of her CIA handlers.

However, like the heroine of Stranger Things, Hanna was also just an ordinary teenage girl who had her chance at a normal life stolen from her. Like Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven, Hanna was the subject of secret government experimentation, and she gained extraordinary abilities as a result of the secret program’s experiments. Unlike Eleven, Hanna’s powers weren’t outright supernatural, although her skill as an assassin did border on the superhuman.

In Hanna, the CIA’s ULTRAX program recruited pregnant women, enhanced the DNA of their babies to create super-soldiers, and then raised these children to be professional contract killers in the decade and a half that followed. Like Eleven, Hanna is a teenage heroine trying to tackle the standard struggles that come with coming of age while also dealing with murderous agents hunting her down.

The difference is that Hanna can’t move anything with her mind, although she is a killer who wouldn’t seem out of place in the John Wick cinematic universe. Early on in the series, CIA operative Marissa Wiegler is tasked with killing Hanna alongside the rest of the program’s young recruits, but her failure to terminate her charge eventually results in the pair building an unexpectedly close relationship across the show’s three twisty seasons.

Hanna’s Two-Season Story Did Something Stranger Things Never Could

Meanwhile, the late, great Ray Liotta plays the CIA’s head honcho, while Dermot Mulroney, Mireille Enos, and Joel Kinnaman round out Hanna’s starry supporting cast. The show’s lineup is impressive, but it was Hanna’s ability to pull off a plot that Stranger Things never quite got right that allowed the show to truly shine. In between its many car chases, gun battles, and fist fights, the pulse-pounding action thriller show explored the title character’s exposure to normal life.

Hanna was, at her core, an ordinary teenager who wanted to experience a normal life despite the traumas that shaped her formative years. While goofier movies, like Barely Lethal, have offered comedic spins on this theme, Hanna sincerely engaged with what a teenage assassin’s transition to relative normality might look like. In contrast, Stranger Things tried this with its psychokinetic heroine Eleven, especially in season 3, but she never really got to be a normal teenage girl.

The main issue was Stranger Things, like the later Netflix hit Wednesday, was a big-budget series that was more concerned with dramatic set pieces and supernatural action than character development. When Eleven wasn’t evading government agents and the Demogorgon in season 1, she was hiding from Hawkins Lab and traveling to the city in season 2, being trained to defeat Vecna in the desert in season 4, or battling monsters in the Upside-Down in season 5.

As noted above, 2019’s season 3 was the show’s lone attempt to devote serious screen time to Eleven’s teenage self-expression. The problem was that Stranger Things season 3 was also an infamously cartoonish, over-the-top self-parody of a season, which meant that Eleven’s story was reduced to an unnecessary breakup with a newly boorish Mike and a shopping montage with Max.

Hanna’s Original Movie Is Worth Watching Too

While there might be a lot of frivolity and fun to life as a teenage girl, there is also hardship, heartache, and more difficult emotional moments, and Stranger Things never really did these justice in Eleven’s story. In contrast, even though the show’s premise was essentially Prime Video’s Reacher with a 15-year-old in the Reacher role, Hanna took time between the cracked bones and crashed motorbikes to get at the heart of its heroine’s story.

It didn’t hurt that the Prime Video show had some stellar source material to work with. In 2011, Atonement director Joe Wright directed Saoirse Ronan in an earlier movie version of Hanna. Ronan played the teen assassin while Eric Bana played her protective father, a former CIA operative who raised her to take down the shady agency. Co-starring Cate Blanchett as the CIA agent tasked with taking down Hanna, the 2011 movie was a $65 million hit at the box office.

Hanna’s original incarnation was also a critical hit, with reviewers praising its slick action sequences and Ronan’s committed central turn. As such, it should come as no surprise that, when Prime Video rebooted the franchise by blending Jason Bourne and Stranger Things to make Hanna in 2019, the result was a hit action thriller series.

Release Date

2019 – 2020

Network

Amazon Prime Video

Showrunner

David Farr

Directors

David Farr

Writers

David Farr

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