Review of Haywire (2011) by Reuben M — 23 Mar 2013

HAYWIRE was a deeply disappointing movie. Steven Soderbergh has helmed some truly outstanding movies over the year, and when I heard that he was making his own action-thriller with a great cast...I was pretty pumped.

My first hint that this movie might not be great was in his casting of Gina Carano, a well-known MMA star, in the lead. She brought limited acting experience to the film, which Soderbergh essentially crafted for her. This is similar to the way in which he created GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE to showcase porn star Sasha Gray in a "legit" role. The movie was well-nigh unwatchable, and Gray was okay at best. Carano is also okay at best. She's supposed to be carrying an entire movie on her shoulders, but through no fault of her own, she isn't much of an actor. She's got the action moves down, and I certainly believed she could kick the butt of all these male adversaries...but when required to show emotion, or humor, or determination or any recognizable emotion...her skills were pretty tiny. Again, Soderbergh apparently saw "movie star" in her somewhere and crafted this project for her. I don't blame her for letting him...but I also doubt we'll be seeing her in many lead roles in the near future.

HAYWIRE tells the story of a black-ops agent (Carano) who has apparently been targeted for elimination by someone she knows as an ally. The movie tells its story out-of-order...and frankly, I'm not sure there's a good reason for that. It makes the story needlessly complicated, yet adds NOTHING to the suspense. We're essentially going from one fight scene to another, and the plot is so thin and the explanations so sketchy...all we know is that we should be rooting FOR her and against anyone trying to kill her. I suppose I could have given more effort to sorting out the plot specifics...but the movie is so murkily filmed and so un-involving from the get-go that I had no impetus for working that hard.

I had hoped for a guilty-pleasure film...but I'm astonished to say that even a mediocre Jason Statham movie will give you more vicarious action thrills, and will skip the artsy pretense. There is certainly a case to be made for "artsy" genre thrillers (DRIVE springs to mind)...but HAYWIRE is just boring. Carano has some pretty high profile co-stars, but their roles are either tiny and undemanding (Bill Paxton, Michael Douglass, Antonio Banderas) or the actor can barely muster up any intensity for their role (Ewan McGregor is bland as Carano's boss and Michael Fassbender seems vaguely embarrassed to be in the film). Channing Tatum generates momentary interest...but his dialogue is also mush-mouthed at times.

It's tempting to give this film one-star, but I'll stick with two because if nothing else, the one-on-one fight scenes ring with some authenticity...people actually seem to get hurt. I think Carano could be a nice small part of a bigger film...something like THE EXPENDIBLES, perhaps. But she is no star...no matter how well she kicks a*s.