Steven Soderbergh has never needed a reason to get a little experimental with his films. As he inches closer to retirement, he's become even more of a mad scientist, blending his refined directorial talents with unconventional genres. Last year, those skills were put to terrifying use in the real world horror, Contagion. While he's skirted along the fringes of action movies before with the phenomenal Out of Sight and The Limey, he's never gone balls to the wall in the way Haywire does.
Bear in mind that "balls to the wall" has a very different meaning when it applies to Soderbergh than say someone like Brett Ratner. Haywire is probably the least substantial film Soderbergh has done since Oceans Thirteen, and yet it's a well-crafted, intelligent action flick with the type of realistic, bone crunching violence that should have fans of Jason Bourne salivating.
Similar to his casting porn star Sasha Grey for his call girl drama, The Girlfriend Experience, Soderbergh has found gold by casting a non-professional with perfect traits to be his star. In this case it's MMA grappler, Gina Carano, and she gets her pick of the A-list litter when it comes to beating down her male counterparts. She plays black ops agent Mallory Kane, and if her name alone doesn't tell you she's a bad ass then you won't have to wait long to see her put those cage brawling skills to good use. Let's just say that Channing Tatum didn't catch a beatdown of this magnitude in Fighting. The shock comes with the sheer brutality of the assault. We're trained to expect the woman to be treated with kid gloves, so to speak, but there is no holding back. Carano as well is like a feral animal unleashed. She's born for this type of role, and Soderbergh exploits that to the fullest. His camera never flinches, and forces you to take in every single blow. Tatum is only the first of many buff Hollywood pretty boys to meet the business end of Carano's fist. After Mallory Kane is blackmailed by her superiors, she goes off on a globe-trotting, butt kicking quest for payback against the men who run her life. Ewan McGregor is her smarmy wuss of a boss, who may have set the whole thing up. Michael Douglas puts on his Gordon Gekko hat as a shadowy figure with questionable allegiances, while Antonio Banderas rocks a Fidel Castro beard as a government suit with an agenda. Everybody has an angle. That includes Michael Fassbender, yes he of Shame frontal nudity fame and every woman's nightly dreams. He plays a hitman working alongside Kane, and as they're alone together in a swanky hotel room, the sexual tension is thick enough to cut with a knife. Then the real cutting begins as they explode into a hotel smashing battle royale that sees him catching the smackdown of his life.
It's not spoiling anything to say that Kane cuts a path through practically everyone in her path. This is Soderbergh's attempt at a popcorn flick, and it's essentially a showcase for Carano. The easy comparison is The Bourne Identity, with Carano as the perfect blank slate killing machine. Lem Dobbs, who wrote The Limey for Soderbergh way back in 1999, creates a similar world to that one, dark and ambiguous, an abrasive fantasy where people like Kane can thrive. Backed by a jazzy, horn heavy score, Haywire invokes images of those old 1960s Matt Helm movies with Dean Martin.
Carano manages to upstage her more famous, more experienced co-stars, and it isn't solely due to her atheletic ability. Her male colleagues all hold their own extremely well in that department, especially Fassbender. It's that she's unlike any female action star we've seen, at least not in the last decade or so. She's not like Angelina Jolie, who has long been the queen when it comes to roles like this. It's that Carano can simply do things Jolie can't. Some of the maneuvers she pulls off are unbelievable, contorting her body like a snake or balancing on the wall in some crazy ninjitsu kick thing. You can't even come up with words to describe some of the stuff she does. Carano isn't a refined actress by any means, but that actually works to the film's advantage. She's got the look, charisma, and appeal of a future star. One film in and there's nobody I'd rather see in action than her.
Trav's Tip: Haywire may be Carano's big breakthrough role, but she's been around longer than people think. She was Crush on the NBC revival of American Gladiators, and also appeared in the the straight-to-DVD film, Blood and Bone, starring Michael Jai White.
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