Haywire

Director Stephen Soderbergh seems to have gotten a little bit of his mojo back.

After a couple of patchy years where he delivered some of the most boring (the interminably long Che biopics) and offensively lazy (anything with Ocean’s in the title) films imaginable, he’s managed to make two relatively decent, watchable films back to back with last year’s Contagion and now Haywire.

An unashamedly dumb action-thriller, Haywire sees Soderbergh have a bit of fun for once with a script where the story is just a vehicle for lots of gloriously over the top fight scenes. And while it is certainly not perfect, it is definitely entertaining.
Former American Gladiator (I kid you not), Gina Carano, plays Mallory Kane, a freelance spy who is hired by corporations and governments to head up the kind of missions that they don’t want tracing back to them. When we first meet Mallory, she is sitting in an anonymous diner looking a bit shifty. She is soon joined by fellow operative Aaron (Channing Tatum) whose attempts to manhandle her result in a severe arse-kicking. Mallory is not a woman to be messed with as we learn in the course of a series of flashbacks. She is on the run having found herself on the receiving end of a double-cross from someone close to her and, unfortunately for everyone else, Mallory knows her martial arts and isn’t afraid to use them. Carnage ensues. Total, utter carnage.

Haywire is good fun but it surely does not bode well that your abiding thought on leaving the cinema after watching Haywire, Stephen Soderbergh’s star-studded action-thriller, is: “why the hell didn’t they just get Angelina Jolie to do it?”. If ever a film was written for Jennifer Aniston’s arch-nemesis it was this one. It doesn’t help their cause that they seem to have gone out of their way to find an actress to play the lead role that looks extraordinarily like Jolie but has none of her undeniable charisma.

Carano is very much the weak link here. She’s definitely good at beating the living daylights out of men twice her size but she seems entirely vacant throughout. This is the second film in which Soderbergh has cast an unknown female lead (he pulled the same trick when he used porn star Sasha Grey for The Girlfriend Experience) and, once again, the result is similarly uninspiring. Carano delivers her lines with grim determination – there is no sparkle in her eye, no sense of joy. In fact, she’s pretty dead behind the eyes throughout.

Luckily, her rather flat performance is overshadowed by strong supporting cast headed up by Ewan McGregor, playing the villain for once. It is Michael Fassbender though who pulls the rug from under his co-stars delivering the film’s most successful sequence as an operative working with Mallory on a job in Dublin who isn’t all he’s cracked up to be. It’s at this point that Haywire, which feels a little blah for the first 15 minutes, really comes to life when the Dublin section kicks into gear and it manages to successfully maintain that energy for the remainder of the film. The fight scene between Fassbender and Kane, in which they wreak havoc on one of the Shelbourne’s rather lovely looking rooms, is one of the standout moments.

It is after Dublin, when Mallory travels back to the US to try to clear her name (really, they didn’t make much of an effort avoiding tired cinema staples), that Haywire begins to lose its way a bit. The action is still excellent but the story becomes insanely convoluted and by the end you really aren’t entirely sure what’s happened. Soderbergh has also assembled a great supporting cast and given some of them – namely Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas – feck all to do. Seems a bit of a waste.

Nevertheless, and as long as you don’t think too hard about it, Haywire is good craic. It would have been better craic with Jolie in it but you can’t win ‘em all.

Stars: ***