Review of Haywire (2011) by Bruce S — 24 Oct 2012

I was hoping this movie would be really good, but the truth is that it's just ok. It's an action movie, with a large cast of A-list actors and an Oscar-winning director, and so you think it would be doing something really exciting. To a certain extent, it is - I really admired the way the action scenes here were shot and performed. But the bare-bones story and utter lack of character development render the movie nothing more than an exercise, albeit a very competent and fairly cool one.

The story is basically just The Bourne Identity, except with a girl. Gina Carano, a real-life MMA fighter, plays Mallory Kane, a privately employed secret agent who is betrayed for murky reasons. This puts her up against a bunch of villains played by seriously major actors, including Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, and Channing Tatum. Carano handles the action scenes and the scenes where she doesn't have to talk just fine, though her dialogue readings often sound a bit amateurish. The other actors all turn in passably good performances, but the movie relies heavily on each of their previously established personas, since it doesn't develop them at all.

The movie was directed by Steven Soderbergh, known for movies like sex, lies, and videotape, Ocean's Eleven and its sequels, Traffic, and Erin Brockovich. I guess he made this just to prove that he could make a straight-ahead action movie if he wants, and he does prove that. The action scenes are shot with a fairly distant, stationary camera in reasonably long takes - none of the rapid-editing/handheld stuff for Soderbergh. The result is that the action looks good, makes sense, and feels intense. I appreciated how well it was put together. I also enjoyed the movie's soundtrack, which is like a 1960s James Bond score on steroids. Unfortunately, because the characters are generally so thin and the plot so minimalist, there isn't really much to hold on to here besides the action sequences.