Somebody please put this woman in a film with Jason Statham - Haywire

Haywire

Working for a freelance security company that’s essentially a deniable CIA-front, Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) is a highly-trained, covert  black ops specialist; she does the dirty jobs the US government doesn’t like to admit to, off the books and on the quiet. 

After successfully rescuing a Chinese dissident journalist being held hostage in Barcelona, she’s looking forward to a well-deserved rest when boss and ex-boyfriend Kenneth (Ewan McGregor) asks her to do one last little job for him.  Nothing too difficult.  Practically a paid holiday.  All she has to do is go to Dublin and play trophy wife to a smooth British MI6 officer Paul (Michael “Grrr” Fassbender) at a party where he’s trying to get next to a shady international fixer (Mathieu Kassovitz).

But when the suave Paul turns on her and tries to kill her, Mallory finds herself out in the cold, framed for murder and hunted by her own people.  On the run, she’s forced to fall back on her own deadly skills to survive as she hunts her betrayers and tries to clear her name.       

Almost a throwback to paranoid 70s spy thrillers like Three Days Of The Condor and The Killer Elite (the Peckinpah movie not the recent Statham-starrer), whose plot it filches, Haywire is an action-packed, globe-trotting, Bourne-style romp.  The story holds few surprises, is merely an excuse to string together a series of brutally intense, hyper-kinetic fight scenes full of painful snappy noises and breathless, propulsive chases, one sequence in particular, a chase across the rooftops of Dublin, the equal of Bourne or Bond, Carano’s Mallory forced to improvise and use her environment to evade a machinegun-packing SWAT team.  Soderbergh brings his usual clinical coolness to the spy genre, Haywire at times verging on an exercise in style over substance, the surface gloss and sheer dynamic drive of the plot, eclipsing the lightness of the characterisation.  

But who needs characterisation when you have a cast this fantastic?  Michael Fassbender again proves just why he should be Bond, delivering a suave, dashing secret agent who in the blink of an eye switches into ice-cold killer mode.  Ewan McGregor thankfully keeps it in his pants for a change, his nervy, weasly Kenneth a duplicitous bureaucrat who kills with a phone call rather than a gun. Michael Douglas brings gravitas while Antonio Banderas brings a world-weary charm and roguish twinkle to their roles as career spooks and Bill Paxton is suitably moral and upright as the only man Mallory can truly trust; her father, a former marine turned military author.  Most surprising perhaps however is G.I. Joe Channing Tatum, who, as Mallory’s former comrade and occasional booty call Aaron, takes part in the first of the film’s many bone-crunching, kinetic fight scenes as he and Carano battle it out in the booth of a small-town diner.  Chiseled and pretty, Tatum stays just the right side of ambiguous, his confident, douche-bag jock persona masking a consummate professional who’s just doing what he’s told.  Every member of the cast is note-perfect and, like last year’s Contagion which was also shockingly light on character, Soderbergh has cast actors who bring to their roles the baggage of past performances, supplying their own back stories.

The film however not only relies upon but is built upon the strong shoulders of mixed martial artist and former American Gladiator Gina Carano who is simply stunning.  As at home in an evening gown as she is beating the crap out of her male co-stars, she has real screen presence and an ease in front of the camera that belies the fact it's her first major screen role.  Obviously she's great in the action scenes which showcase her MMA skills but it's the quieter moments that surprise and there's echoes of Soderbergh’s Out of Sight in the father/daughter relationship between Gina Carano and Bill Paxton which brings to mind that film’s Jenny from the Block and Dennis Farina.  Tough, sexy and assured, Carano gives a star-making performance, announcing to cinema’s tough guys that their days are numbered.  

Now somebody please put this woman in a film with Jason Statham.  Watching those two duke it out would be the guiltiest of guilty pleasures…

David Watson

Director

Steven Soderbergh

Writers

Lem Dobbs

Cast

Gina Carano, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton, Michael Douglas, Mathieu Kassovitz, Michael Angarano

Country

USA

Running time

93 minutes

Year

2011