Haywire

Steven Soderbergh directed action film Haywire, which stars a martial artist in the lead role. The story starts in the middle as Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) is on the lam and asking her superiors for help. Instead they send a man who tries to kill her. This takes place in a small roadside diner, she escapes, but grabs a teenager (Michael Angarano) in the diner and uses his car to flee and tells him her tale of woe, so part of the rest of the film is a flashback.

We come to see why she is on the run. Mallory works at a black ops company hired by the government to detract a Chinese journalist who had been taken hostage. This is successful, and she is looking forward to some down time as she has had several jobs back to back. But her handler, Kenneth (Ewan Macgregor) asks her to take an easy job, where she has to partner with a British operative (Michael Fassbender) and pretend to be his wife. Not trusting her "husband," she smells something fishy and finds she has been framed for killing someone.


Mallory tries to find who and why while trying to stay out of their clutches. Among the suspects are Kenneth, Aaron the killer from the diner (Channing Tatum), Coblenz the owner of the black ops company (Michael Douglas), and Rodrigo (Antonio Banderas) who contracted Coblenz's firm in the first place. Also part of the story is Mallory's father (Bill Paxton) who knows what her work involves and is an author of spy novels of the type of work she does.

Like these types of spy films, the story goes to several international cities--Barcelona, Dublin, D.C.--but none are given any character except to serve as a not very exotic backdrop. They were filmed nicely though, I could feel the Soderbergh influence.

The lead, Gina Carano, gives a flat performance and I think is not convincing as an actor. It's one thing to be a hardened or stoic spy trying not to show your feelings, but she is a blank slate and I get no sense of any personality.

I found it odd that in several fighting scenes there was little reaction from the people around them. In the diner, when Aaron and Mallory are beating each others brains out, the waitress doesn't scream and the other diners don't react (except the teen who tries to save Mallory but is unfit to do so). But even he is not very fazed to have her kidnap him, take his car, shove a gun in his face. After she tells him her story, that to me doesn't seem enough for him to trust her to take her side, it's just a story after all--he seems to trust her a lot and goes along with her plan.

There are several down and dirty fight scenes where the upperhand goes from Mallory to her attacker and back again. I was not entirely convinced of her intelligence or why exactly people wanted her framed, the film did not make a strong enough case for me.