Haywire: Soderbergh’s Not-So-Serious Movie

Steven Soderbergh has said in an interview with Indiewire that his appetite for making "serious" movies really dropped after his two-part biopic, Che.  The director of previous serious affairs like Traffic and Solaris and experiments like Schizopolis and Bubble, Soderbergh says that he's been looking for projects that are more fun both for himself and the audience.  Seeing as Haywire is a barely 90-minute action/thriller starring an MMA fighter with negligible dramatic acting experience, it's safe to say Soderbergh is well on his way to fulfilling that goal.  Whether or not that's a good thing is a different story. 

Gina Carano, said MMA fighter, stars as Mallory Kane, a freelance covert operative who's hired out by her handler and ex-boyfriend, Kenneth (Ewan McGregor), "to various global entities to perform jobs which governments can't authorize and heads of state would rather not know about."  I copied that portion of the summary from IMDB because, despite a stellar supporting cast portraying them, none of the characters seem too concerned with explaining what they're doing or why they're doing it.  Wikipedia has helped me fill in some of the gaps by informing me that at the outset of Mallory's trouble, Kenneth had hired her out to government agent, Coblenz (Michael Douglas) and his contact, Rodrigo (Antonio Banderas).  This story is relayed to Scott (Michael Angarno), an audience surrogate who finds himself the passenger of his own hijacked car after Mallory staves off an attack from Aaron (Channing Tatum), her former partner, when the film first begins.

Mallory recalls a successful hostage rescue in Barcelona followed by an immediate dispatch to Dublin where she is to play the female half of a power couple with British agent Paul (Michael Fassbender) to do something with some guy named Studer (Mathieu Kassovitz) who's important for some reason.  After Mallory finds the aforementioned hostage from Barcelona dead, a betrayal soon follows.  One fantastically awesome hotel room-eviscerating fight later and Mallory is on the run, trying to escape the government agents tracking her while simultaneously trying to get to the bottom of the betrayal.

Soderbergh has said that before there was even an idea for a Haywire script, he knew he wanted to make a movie built around Gina Carano, and it shows – she's in every scene, she's given the best clichéd action quips, and there's no shortage of sequences that show off her ability to serve opponents a healthy portion of ass whooping.  Haywire particularly revels in the latter, sporting impressive choreography that's given an extra smoothness and brutality thanks to Soderbergh's decision to let the fights play out completely sans soundtrack.  When David Holmes is allowed to kick in, viewers are treated to a light, suave soundtrack reminiscent of the leisurely confidence of Ocean's Eleven or the James Bond films. 

To her credit, Carano handles the lead reins well.  Carano doesn't speak much and when she does she's terse and surprisingly throaty, but it fits her character as the cold, calculating, badass action hero.  Unfortunately, she's surrounded by a blanket of award winners and nominees who can't rise above a script that seems hastily thrown together for the sake of a leading woman who wouldn't be able to handle much more than superficiality.  The fact that Haywire is an entertaining thriller despite a plot that doesn't explain itself and a "meh" of an ending is a testament to Soderbergh's versatility directing inspired action sequences. 

Haywire won't require you to expend much mental stamina to get through it, but for a director that's lost his vigor for "serious" films, maybe that's all that's required to consider the film a success.