10:00 am Jan. 20, 20122
Haywire is the kind of movie that everyone tries to make and almost nobody gets quite right. Thankfully, director Steven Soderbergh isn't everybody.
Soderbergh's shoulder-deep forays into pulp, like Out of Sight and Contagion, have been impressive, mostly, because he's a consummately self-assured story-teller. He knows exactly when to put the mute button on his films and focus expressly on visual story-telling. Haywire is a great reminder that, when Soderbergh's firing on all cylinders, he knows exactly how to pace a scene, how much dialogue is necessary to get his points across and how to get great performances from his actors. Haywire is pretty much Soderbergh in peak condition: He's reunited with Lem Dobbs, the screenwriter of Soderbergh's fantastic, no-nonsense thriller The Limey, and hooked up with a terrific ensemble cast, led by newcomer Gina Carano. Soderbergh hasn't reinvented the wheel, but he has delivered a familiar story with exceptional maturity and skill.
The plot: Carano plays Mallory Kane, a former Marine who works with a shady mercenary outfit run by Kenneth (Ewan MacGregor), who is also Mallory's ex. On a mission to Barcelona, Mallory and colleague Aaron (Fighting's Channing Tatum) are tasked with finding and delivering a hostage safely back to American custody.
Mallory then heads to Dublin after accepting a highly lucrative last-minute assignment from Kenneth. Naturally, this mission does not go as well as the first one did. The hostage from her prior mission is found murdered and Mallory has been set up. So Mallory runs around and busts heads in order to find out who sold her out and then summarily put them down. Pretty basic, right?
What's really exciting about Haywire is seeing Soderbergh and Dobbs deliver such a familiar narrative with as much flair as they do. The scene in which Mallory realizes she's been set up is especially masterful. At this point, we've already seen Mallory meet up with Paul (Shame's Michael Fassbender), her contact on her botched mission in Dublin. Kenneth tells Mallory that Paul will recognize her thanks to a brooch* she's told to wear. That same brooch is later found in the clutches of the Barcelona mission's hostage.
When Mallory sees the brooch, Soderbergh flashes back to the earlier scene in which she meets Paul for the first time. Then we see the brooch again, so we, like Mallory, can see why wearing it in public was really so important to Paul: Mallory is being filmed by the Dublin airport's network of closed-circuit cameras during this first meeting. By showing us all of this quickly through a kinetic montage sequence (kudos to head editor Corey Bates and his team), we realize just how much trouble Mallory is in, while also getting a taste of the adrenaline rush that comes with that revelation.
Soderbergh is apparently comfortable with the material he's been given. So it's great to see him deliver a film that doesn't look like an Ocean's Eleven sequel. He's got his story on such a tight leash that you begin to even anticipate the little conversations that Carano has with supporting actors like Michael Douglas, who plays Coblenz, a G-man whom Kenneth deals with sometimes and who eventually tries to bring Mallory in from the cold. Their dialogue is measured without being rushed, simple without being arid, and charming without being forced. This is the true sign of Haywire's quality; it's what you always want but pretty much never get from post-Bourne Identity action movies.
But while watching Soderbergh deliver a lean, straightforward spy flick is a pleasure unto itself, one should also remember that Haywire wouldn't work nearly as well without a star worth giving a damn about. Carano, a real-life mixed martial arts fighter, delivers a great performance as an ass-kicking femme. Dobbs doesn't play around with the fact that Carano is an action heroine and not a hero. No time is spent time establishing that Mallory is an empowered woman. It's simply evident that she can handle the men who are out to get her and and that she will inevitably get her way.
On top of that, Carano is that rare performer who is both actually really good at stunt-work and a totally charismatic performer. Most stunt-men who try their hands at playing action heroes are simply not star material (ex: parkour gurus Cyril Raffaelli and Davie Belle, the stars of the District B13 films).
At first, the deliberate, even-handed tone of Carano's line-readingsmakse it seem as if she's trying to show off a newly acquired mastery of spoken English. But eventually, you see that that clipped, almost monotonously flat style of talking is a natural part of the character. Mallory will get answers. She will hurt people. She will win.
And that's what's so refreshing about Haywire, in a nutshell: you know where it's going, but watching it get there is pure fun.
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