TWO- FISTED THRILLER HITS THE TARGET
Soderbergh film showcases butt- kicking talents of former mixed- martial- arts fighter Gina Carano
HAYWIRE Starring: Gina Carano, Ewan Mcgregor, and Michael Fassbender Directed by: Steven Soderbergh PG: violence, sexual content Running time: 93 minutes Rating:
Steven Soderbergh isn’t one for simplicity.
In his movies both highbrow and low, he’s fond of shuffling chronologies, storylines, characters and — in his taut and almost laughably confounding thriller, Haywire — movie stars: Here comes Channing Tatum, there goes Antonio Banderas, and hey! Michael Fassbender is about to arrive ( shirtless, although, in this post- Shame role, with pants on this time). Hello, Michael Douglas. Good to see you, Bill Paxton.
All that, and a plot that will make perfect sense to people who sat serenely through Contagion or Traffic, is just window dressing, however. Haywire is a showcase for a new action hero, former mixed-martialarts fighter Gina Carano, an attractive and sturdylooking kicker of butt who punches out most of the cast and subdues the rest with her signature move, a headlock applied with two muscular legs that’s designed to choke the life out of the bad guys.
Carano plays Mallory Kane, a mercenary agent who works for one of those shadowy companies for hire that the U. S. government uses for operations so complex, they eventually become Steven Soderbergh movies. Mallory is technically an action heroine, but, as her boss Kenneth ( Ewan Mcgregor) says, smiling, knowingly, “You shouldn’t think of her as a woman. No, that would be a mistake.”
Essentially, she’s a more sociable Lisbeth Salander after a good meal ( OK, two good meals), and she’s in almost every scene of Haywire, not so much an acting coup as one of those old- fashioned coups to the chops.
If there’s a problem, beyond the fact that you may never know exactly what’s going on, it’s that the movie has an endless appetite for scenes of Carano beating people up. She’s good at it, but after a while, the picture starts to feel like a very long cage match.
Haywire travels the world, starting in upper New York State, where Mallory is accosted in a diner by Aaron ( Tatum), a former colleague in a job gone wrong. Their reunion devolves into a beautifully staged fist fight: For all his big- budget training in the Oceans films, Soderbergh maintains an indie spirit, and he’s content to park his camera and let us watch the fists fly without all that editing- by-food-processor that so often comprises ( and confuses) the modern action scene.
Mallory escapes, taking an uninvolved bystander ( Michael Angarano) with her. She begins telling him the story of her career, and Haywire unfolds in a criss- crossing flashback that travels from Barcelona to Dublin to Washington to New Mexico to old Mexico to Majorca, stopping in each spot so that she can whale the bejesus out of this villain or that.
Figuring out who, in fact, is a villain is another challenge: There’s Kenneth, her smooth boss who has a history with his star operative ( Carano looks uncomfortably sexy in scenes where she trades in her combat boots for a little black dress, but the sexy is undeniably there); there’s Coblenz ( Douglas), a U. S. government bigwig; there’s Rodrigo ( Banderas, fetching in a salt- andpepper beard), who has hired Mallory for the Barcelona job; and there’s Paul ( Fassbender), a British operative who poses as her husband for an operation in Dublin that doesn’t run easily.
As a famous- person bonus, Paxton brings a calm authority to his role as Mallory’s father, an ex- marine.
The star power is subsumed in an intricate story by screenwriter Lem Dobbs ( The Limey): A pursuit through the streets of Dublin, for instance, races along on foot, up and down alleyways and staircases and over rooftops. It helps humanize Mallory, who could — in less adept hands — turn into one of those indomitable comic book superheroes who have given biceps such a dodgy reputation.
She’s more Bourne than Rambo, and she may be just what the movies need: not a girl with a dragon tattoo, exactly, but a woman with a devastating right.