Review: Haywire

Oh, Haywire isn’t a Transformers kind of action film; it’s the kind of action movie that Michael Caine once made, or that the Bond movies used to be – I mean, really used to be, long ago, two or three decades before Pierce Brosnan. Remember From Russia With Love, when Sean Connery and Robert Shaw just spent a solid four or five minutes beating the holy snot out of each other in a too-small train compartment? Haywire is a string of plot contrivances designed to deliver real-life ass-whupper Carano into a consecutive series of opportunities to hand a single-file line of modern-day Robert Shaws their butts in similar style.

We open in a diner, and watch a fraught meet-up between Carano’s Mallory Kane (yep – Mallory Kane) and Channing “Duke” Tatum’s thuggish Aaron. Quite quickly, the conversation becomes an attempted hit – and the club-footed authority with which Mallory disables Aaron and makes off with a van and a hostage set the stage for the film to come. “Fasten your seatbelt,” Mallory mentions as she peals out of the parking lot; quite unnecessarily, I’d say.

The performances, and the music, and (again) that name, Mallory Kane, tell us we’re in an exploitation picture, and if Drive was dressed-up explo made up entirely of held pauses and Gosling “Hey girls”, then Haywire is nearly the precise opposite – an effortlessly stylish, ninja-quick free run through a low-rent international intrigue scenario where Mallory finds herself the patsy in a put-up job for her slimy, mercenary contractor boss (Ewan McGregor, who gives good slimy).

Carano’s no actress, and her performance styling never modulates far beyond “terse,” but Soderbergh and his screenwriter, Lem Dobbs, have engineered a picture that essentially makes that complaint a non-starter by framing Mallory as exactly the sort of person who never would modulate far beyond “terse.” The key inspiration is the casting of everybody else, who – from McGregor to bigger-dick Michael Fassbender, with Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, and effortlessly scene-stealing Bill Paxton along for the ride – give masters’ classes in how “supporting acting” is supposed to work. And then, every twelve or fifteen minutes or so, Carano gets the chance to kick the shit out of somebody.

It’s pretty thin stuff at the end of the day, not even matching Soderbergh’s recent (very recent – four months ago!) Contagion for dramatic ballast or movie-movie entertainment value. But, it’s a very effective advertisement for Gina Carano, and another brick in the wall of post-CGI realism. We’ve seen a lot of fantasy worlds and flying space cops, but boy, they scarcely hold a candle to the treat of seeing an honest-to-goodness mixed-martial-artist choke the life out of McFassers with her thighs.

One last thing. A few years back, Steven Soderbergh announced that he was retiring. I call shenanigans. There’s too much joy in the process evident in his recent films, and one can’t help but note that his retirement date stays a comfortable five projects away. Most directors set up and complete films one at a time; Soderbergh is in very rare company in that he can be working on as many as four films at any given moment. Now here’s Haywire. It cost about $23M to make, stars a non-actor because she’s actually the most qualified person for the job, has an enthusiastic supporting cast of the absolute best Hollywood has to offer, and was (as usual) shot by Soderbergh himself who, in his secondary career as a DOP, is more qualified to shoot digital motion pictures than 90% of the ASC. Now let me ask you: if you were the director who pulled off everything I’ve mentioned in that last sentence… would you retire?