Soderbergh's Haywire: Good Workout, Not So Good Movie

Soderberghs Haywire: Good Workout, Not So Good Movie Image

Gina “Conviction” Carano has spent plenty of time before the camera. This brunette Muay Thai warrior queen was Crush on American Gladiator and, on Showtime, the heartthrob of women’s Mixed Martial Arts—a combination of boxing and wrestling, plus the kicking, hair-pulling and eye-gouging of a brawl in a convent schoolyard. Carano’s one defeat, to jujitsu blond Cris “Cyborg” Santos, provided five minutes of electrifying brutality. Outside the ring, she boasts fluent conversational skills and a lighthouse smile. So there’s no reason she couldn’t make it big in movies. Jeez, Steven Seagal did.

Another Steven, Soderbergh, had just the launch pad for Carano: a studiously generic action project, called Haywire, that would serve as a parade ground for her fighting skills by casting her as Mallory Kane, a U.S. government contract who's betrayed and sucker-punched by nearly every operative she's worked with. Pairing Mallory with one male antagonist after another and throwing them both into spaces as cramped as a MMA cage—a rural diner, a hallway, a hotel room—the director gets Carano to simulate her professional strength, stamina and pugilistic ingenuity. It's James Bond vs. Rosa Klebb in the From Russia With Love train compartment, only you're rooting for Rosa. For those who yearn to see a woman beat the crap out of Channing Tatum, or best Michael Fassbender in a bedroom, or leave Ewan McGregor whimpering, this is your movie.

(MORE: See TIME's review of Michael Fassbender in Shame)

In golden-age Hollywood, the main character in a woman's picture was someone with the skills to bend a man's emotions to hers. These days, a movie woman proves her femininity by having the biggest cojones around. In the script by Lem Dobbs (a pseudonym, borrowed from Humphrey Bogart's character in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, taken by Anton Kitaj, the son of painter R.B. Kitaj), Mallory gets to prove her testicular fortitude in the first few minutes. Sitting in an upstate New York diner, she is briefly wooed, then savagely punched, by her old partner Aaron (Tatum); in a few minutes he's breakfast hash.

Sent to Barcelona to free a political prisoner, and to Dublin as the "eye candy" escort to freelance spy Paul (Fassbender), Mallory finds she's been set up for her own demise. Everywhere, she encounters unreliable dudes: Michael Douglas as a CIA biggie, Antonio Banderas as some bearded malefactor. The only man she can trust is her father (Bill Paxton), the author of Shooter-style novels and, like Mallory, an ex-Marine. Dad should have turned out to be the ultimate villain—since spy-movie plots, no less than space operas, often climax with the revelation and dispatch of the evil father figure—but Haywire doesn't bother to go there.

(MORE: See Corliss' take on Soderbergh's Che)

The screenplay doesn't bother detonating any surprises at all; narrative ingenuity is sooo 1940s. After the diner donnybrook, Mallory more or less kidnaps a young guy, Scott (Michael Angorano, from Gentlemen Broncos), who serves no plot function but to listen to her flashbacks of the past week; his character is then jettisoned and forgotten. The film also pays little heed to plausibility. Mallory's first fight is ignored by the other diners, who are ignored by the camera. Later she engages in a long, loud battle in a hotel room whose immediate neighbors don't instantly summon the staff. Of course, the mayhem isn't taking place in a diner or a swank suite; it's occurring in an alternate movie universe, whose capital is Soderburg, and where reality never registers a complaint or knocks on the door as they practitioners of the hard arts ply their noisy job.

Only in Soderburg would the climactic showdown, involving Mallory and her final betrayer, be derailed because the unfortunate dastard has got his foot caught in a cleft of beach rocks, as if the movie had suddenly U-turned into a seaside 127 Hours. We'll let someone decide whether this scenario construction is lazy or post-modernist hip. Dobbs and Soderbergh may figure that their audience is here for the fights and not for the coherence, so they may as well goof the system. As sleazy businessman Mathieu Kassovitz tells Mallory while inviting her to wander through a labyrinthine garden, "The whole point is to relax and lose yourself."

(MORE: See TIME's review of Soderbergh's Contagion)

In the two-dozen features he's directed since sex, lies and videotape in 1989, Soderbergh has become full-service auteur, cranking out a movie or two a year and serving pseudonymously as his own cinematographer and editor. He's also been one of the most committed commuters between glossy Hollywood filmmaking (the Ocean's franchise) and no-budget indies (Bubble), not to mention virtually every substratum within the broad spectrum of narrative movies. On one side, Traffic, Erin Brockovich and Contagion; on the other, Kafka, Schizopolis, The Girlfriend Experience and his Spanish-language Che bio-pic; and in the middle, the smartly weird comedies Full Frontal and The Informant!

Soderbergh's Haywire: Good Workout, Not So Good Movie