Haywire
DIRECTED BY STEVEN SODERBERGH
The lean, ass-kicking antithesis to his recent, overstuffed Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire is bales of visceral fun. As with 2009’s The Girlfriend Experience, the prolific, genre-hopping director has built a film around a uniquely suitable leading lady and tailored the spectacle to her highly specific talents. The Girlfriend Experience featured porn star Sasha Grey as a high-class call girl, while Soderbergh this time sets his sights on a different kind of pro, harnessing American Gladiators alum Gina Carano to play an ex-marine turned PMC killing machine. Carano is also a former mixed martial arts fighter, and the playfully self-aware screenplay (from The Limey‘s Lem Dobbs) ensures that her fists, feet, and death-grip thighs get to do much of the talking.
Theoretically, Haywire is a covert-ops thriller, complete with a globe-trotting, nonlinear, trust-no-one narrative, but in practice it makes no bones about its all-action raison d’être. The film’s first conversation, between Carano’s hyper-competent Mallory Kane and an apparent colleague (Channing Tatum), begins with cryptic references to jobs in Dublin and Barcelona, but is swiftly and brutally cut short when the beefy Tatum shatters a coffee cup over Carano’s head. As well as making plain that plot is a secondary concern, the moment establishes that there will be no concessions to Carano’s sex. And, far more plausibly than, say, Uma Thurman’s Bride, Carano’s Mallory amply holds her own against her male counterparts, who, in typical Soderberghian fashion, are an A-list ensemble (including Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, and Michael Douglas).
Also in typical Soderberghian fashion, the director acts as his own DP, and the tandem of his crisp digital lensing and Carano’s DIY stuntwork pays handsome dividends. Wisely, Soderbergh generally opts for the least obtrusive setups possible, and is similarly restrained in his editing, with the result that Haywire‘s copious bone-crunching fight scenes are uncommonly comprehensible. Granted, “comprehensible” may not be conventional pull-quote material, but given Carano’s legitimate action chops, Soderbergh’s decision to spurn superfluous gloss is very much a virtue.