Haywire

Dir. Stephen Soderbergh

Mallory Kane will kick your ass. She may not share many words with you, but she will beat you into submission. As played by mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano, Mallory Kane could be the long-lost sibling of the Driver, played by Ryan Gosling, from last year’s Drive. Both are silent, strong-willed assassins that are no stranger to violence and blood.

Soderbergh’s movie has a very cool sheen to it, mixing warm warmer hues in Barcelona and cooler tones in upstate New York to give the film a very modernist feel. He also employs a tilting and panning camera that he employed in Ocean’s 11 that provides a sort of voyeuristic, security cam feel to the movie. The film zips along across the globe accompanied by a bopping jazz score to help move things along.

Accompanying Carano is an expansive list of leading men including current IT guy Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas. What’s lacking, however, is a unique and coherent plot. In effort to highlight Carano’s fighting skills, which are impressive, the decision was made to limit a cohesive story. It’s basically about a agent being double crossed and sold out by her employer, or something. Dialogue seemed to be a thin glue holding together action sequences which, disappointingly, happened all too infrequently.

Much publicity has been directed to Carano’s acting ability, or rather to her lack of acting history. I personally feel like she casts an aura about her that intrigues and invites questions. You wonder who she is and what she’s plotting. When she speaks, however, she sounds like a regular person acting rather than embodying the character she’s aiming to portray. It’s a bit distracting, but her sheer physicality tends to overcome any of her acting shortcomings.

Haywire is a relatively zippy film, clocking in at just around 93 minutes and serves as kind of a “Best of” in terms of Soderbergh’s skills and themes. It’s nothing that is mindblowing in terms of narrative or even action, but it’s interesting to see the arthouse director extending his range to include some action.

Grade: C+