Haywire (2012)

One of the great truths of action filmmaking is that a movie can be as profoundly dumb as it wants so long as it has smart people working behind it, and this is proven time and again throughout Haywire, Steven Soderbergh’s conventional-yet-somehow-unique revenge thriller. It doesn’t have particularly lofty ambitions (see an unknown female fight her way through a cast of male all-stars!), but whenever it’s in full-on butt-kicking mode it becomes hypnotizing and gripping. With his action scenes, Soderbergh does not want to dizzy us or confuse us. All of the thrills come from watching our hero brutally—and convincingly—knock the living daylights out of all that done her wrong.

The aforementioned unknown is former MMA fighter Gina Carano, and in Haywire she portrays Mallory Kane, an agent for a private firm that works covert assignments for the American government. Things go wrong for her after a couple of missions in Barcelona and Dublin, and she spends much of the film seeking vengeance on anyone who had a hand in the betrayal. That’s the broad outline, but to give away much more would be a mistake. In her quest, she causes serious damage to a cast that includes Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum and Antonio Banderas. Bill Paxton has a brief role as Mallory’s father, Michael Douglas gets a few scenes as a man of the government, and Michael Angarano plays a kid who suddenly finds himself caught in the middle of the chaos.

The biggest flaw in Haywire is that Carano really isn’t much of an actress, per se, but she never really has to be. The material does not call for a character of great emotional depth; Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs just wanted a woman who could hold her own in a fight scene. There’s little doubt they found her in Carano; an intimidating yet beautiful physical presence that never seems out of place in Haywire’s universe. The history of cinema is rife with unconvincing confrontations (for a recent example, see Cruise v. Nyqvist in Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol) yet Carano’s experience as a fighter gives her the decided advantage against anyone in Hollywood, let alone this cast. How many times have we been forced to buy that an actress on the cover of People could convincingly lay waste to a horde of villains? Carano’s work in Haywire quenches a thirst that you may not have even known you had.

The genius of Soderbergh’s direction is that he does nothing to cheapen Carano’s physical prowess. Often he just sets the camera down and lets her go to work, and he only cuts when he absolutely needs to. (Haywire resembles Drive in that way, though these are two very different movies.) He frequently uses long takes and lets the film generate excitement the old fashioned way rather than through frantic editing. Haywire never tricks the audience; it trusts that we will engage with it because what is happening onscreen is exciting, not because the filmmakers took what was happening onscreen and manipulated it so that it became exciting. When he’s not capturing the action, Soderbergh employs a slick-yet-sloppy style that keeps things from ever feeling all that forced. All this is topped off by David Holmes’ score, which seems like it’s out of another decade. And that is not an insult.

As captivating as it is, Haywire never becomes anything more than a combat delivery system, but on that level it works wonders. It’s a response to hundreds of action movies that claim to show a woman doing the dirty work, but it almost always rings hollow. Instead of hiring a professional actress and using a stunt double for the action, Haywire decides to make the stunt double the main character. While that admittedly hurts in the film’s few dramatic scenes, it makes the actual fighting all the more convincing. We seem to be getting back to a point where filmmakers realize that for an action scene to be effective, we need to completely believe that what we’re seeing is actually happening. We need to believe that Tom Cruise is really dangling from the Burj Khalifa. We need to believe that the Fast Five crew is hauling an actual safe through downtown Rio de Janeiro. Haywire doesn’t attempt any stunts of this magnitude, but through every punch, kick and stranglehold, we are entirely convinced that we’re actually watching Carano in the fray. That’s more than we can say about most films of this ilk.

Grade: B+