Steven Soderbergh has made some of my favorite guilty pleasure movies in the last ten to fifteen years. I love “Out of Sight”, “The Limey”, “Traffic” and “Solaris”– even the “Ocean’s” movies were at least, for the most part, solid entertainment. Lately though, it’s starting to seem more and more like Soderbergh may have completely lost his mind. “Magic Mike” was awful. “Contagion” was — okay. I went back and watched “Haywire” and it’s just another gimmick movie that is completely void of everything that made some of his early work so great.
In “Haywire”, which is loaded with ultra-talented actors, a black ops spy chick is on the run from some dudes that set her up while she was on a mission. The super soldier at the heart of this movie is Mallory Kane and she is played by Gina Carano, a MMA fighter with no real acting experience before Soderbergh decided to cast her here. The problem with Carano isn’t that she lacks acting talent, she just lacks the range to supply the emotional depth this character desperately needs.
The story is told out of sequence. We start with Mallory meeting her partner, Aaron (Channing Tatum) at a diner. She thinks he’s there to help but really, he’s there to bring her in. So they fight and she escapes, taking one of the diner patrons as a hostage. As they escape she explains she isn’t the bad guy and launches into a back story of how she got there. It turns out she was sent on a mission to pose as the wife of a MI6 agent (Michael Fassbender). Well, he tries to kill her but she turns the table on him then goes on the run to seek revenge on those who betrayed her.
Again, the movie is loaded with talent surrounding Carano. Aside from Tatum and Fassnbender, Ewan McGregor is in there, Michael Douglass and Antonio Banderas are thrown in but none of their characters really make the film any better. Carano’s lack of experience really shows up in the scenes with each of these actors but really, the problem lies within the script and dare I say, Soderbergh himself. The movie is short but at no point does it ever become engaging. It just kinda meanders along almost in a blah pace.
You just never really find anything to care about as Carano runs around beating the piss out of everyone she thinks has betrayed her. That’s another problem– the fight scenes. Soderbergh can’t direct action scenes. Carano clearly had a hand in choreographing the fights but they look and feel choreographed. You can almost see the actors counting timing beats between each other: “I go here– you go there– I swing– you duck– I flip– you roll”, etc. It’s kind of a mess and takes you out of the story each time.
“Haywire” is a great example of what happens when a director steps too far out of his element in an attempt to work with a specific actor. In this case, he obviously found something he liked about Carano and wanted to give her a showcase. The only problem is he really had no idea what to do with her and her skills. I think Steven Soderbergh should get back to his roots and give us the “Out of Sight” sequel that follows Jack Foley (George Clooney ) and Hejirah Henry (Samuel L. Jackson).
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