HAYWIRE directed by Steven Soderbergh, written by Lem Dobbs, with Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas. An Alliance Films release. 93 minutes. Opens Friday (January 20). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NNNN
Having nudged porn star Sasha Grey into respectable acting with The Girlfriend Experience, Steven Soderbergh turns his attention to MMA fighter and one-time American Gladiator Gina Carano, making her an action hero in Haywire.
A pretzel-logic punch-up that reunites Soderbergh with Lem Dobbs, who wrote his brilliant The Limey, Haywire stars Carano as a hard-ass gun for hire named Mallory Kane, who spends most of the picture outrunning a series of men who mean to do her harm. Precisely why everyone is trying to kill her is the mystery that drives the plot, though we’re led to believe it has something to do with a recent job in Barcelona.
Soderbergh and Dobbs turn the most generic of action plots into a meditation on what we want from action movies. Carano gets plenty of opportunities to beat the living shit out of several fairly intimidating opponents, among them Channing Tatum and Michael Fassbender, but the movie’s rhythms are more about our anticipation of those beat-downs and the way the characters build to the point where they stop talking and start punching each other in the liver. David Holmes’s jazz-inflected score adds a bit of ironic distance, reassuring us that this isn’t one of those gloomy post-Bourne thrillers.
Carano may not be a great acting discovery, but she suits this role just fine. She’s entirely credible as an action hero – with her hair back, she looks like Anna Kendrick’s pissed-off older sister – and she holds her own in dialogue scenes with the likes of Bill Paxton, Ewan McGregor and Michael Douglas.
The action choreography is rough and graceless, which makes it feel real people struggle for any advantage they can get, and it’s not always pretty. But Soderbergh covers the fight scenes in wide shots, so we can appreciate the ingenuity with which Mallory uses confined spaces to her advantage. She might not be able to out-drive her pursuers in a car chase, but god help them if they corner her in a hallway.
normw@nowtoronto.com
