Haywire
It’s odd to have a weekend where I’m interested in more than one opening movie, but this weekend there were three; George Lucas’ Red Tails, Kate Beckinsale’s Underworld: Awakening and Gina Carano’s Haywire. No offense to George and Kate, but I’ve kinda been in love with Gina for a while now so I chose Haywire.
This is Carano’s first starring role and director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, the Ocean’s series) surrounded her with an excellent cast in Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Channing Tatum and Bill Paxton, who plays her father.
In this slow burning spy thriller, Carano plays Mallory Kane, a covert operative who works for McGregor’s Kenneth. Much of the film is told in flashback, moving from Barcelona to Dublin to the US as Kane works to rescue a hostage, obtain information in Dublin and then figure out who burned her after she realizes she’s been framed for a murder.
Peppered throughout the film are some intense fight sequences and chase scenes, which are all perfectly executed by Carano who calls on her Mixed Martial Arts fighting background. Credit is due for Soderbergh, who also acts as cinematographer, because unlike some of his contemporaries, he allows the well-choreographed fights to unfold without the hyper cuts so popular in today’s action films. Carano is brilliant in all of her action scenes and you can tell that she was fully committed to doing much of her own stunt work.
Mixed in with the excellent action sequences there are several slowly paced parts where you can see Carano’s lack of acting experience, but that’s okay because she’s usually on screen with one of the leading men I mentioned. They take over the heavy lifting there, and while some will ding this film for these parts, I believe that Soderbergh did it on purpose. While early on I started to worry that it was going to become boring, the further we went the more I realized that they were just building the suspense. The slower points actually increased my anxiety about what was coming next. How can this get worse for Mallory? Is she going to get out of this alive?
Well, will she? You’ll have to see the film to find that out.
Haywire is in the same vein as the Bourne films and I found that it combined the action well with the story which, while interesting, managed to keep you guessing without becoming overly convoluted.
Gina Carano
Something that I’ll be interested to hear about is what people think of the violence towards Mallory. Unlike the Bourne films, where Matt Damon’s operative beat the snot out of other men, Haywire’s fights pit Mallory against men, and she’s not always the attacker. Within 5 minutes of the film’s opening, Aaron (Tatum) attacks Mallory in a brutal fashion before she can recover and gain the upper hand. Several of the fights go down that way, and with the way Soderbergh filmed them, it can be a little uncomfortable to watch. In my opinion, that’s genius. But you know how people are.
January is generally accepted as a dumping ground for films the distributors don’t feel can make it as a summer hit. That’s a disservice to Haywire. The story, plot, and action are all better in this film than others I’ve seen released in May or June. My guess would be that even with the exceptional cast, nobody wanted to take a gamble on Carano.
Big mistake. She has great presence in this film, you never want to take your eyes off of her. She ranges from glamorous at a Dublin party to beat up and wounded to kicking the shit out of Aaron’s men at her father’s house in New Mexico. Beautiful to wounded to fierce. Believable in all three.
Her line delivery isn’t polished and sometimes you could tell she felt a little awkward with what she was doing on screen, but those things will come with practice. Practice she’s sure to get after Hollywood sees her in this role. I know I’d definitely like to see her in other films, or even a sequel to Haywire, if she chooses to continue acting.
Haywire had an interesting story and I felt it was paced correctly, the fight sequences were excellent and the acting talent in the film was top notch. Soderbergh made some good choices in how to film this movie, especially the fight scenes. Gina Carano handled her role well, it couldn’t have been easy being a first time actress and facing off with Michael Douglas or Ewan McGregor, but you’d never know it. Four wheels of cheddar out of five for Haywire.
