After Haywire, my friend Anthony told our acquiantance Kai: "That's Soderbergh's thing, he does these straight but semi-self-aware genre pieces." Kai to Anthony: "I guess he told everyone he was doing that except Gina Carano." So, that's the issue with Haywire. It's a 60s style spy thriller built around and for Carano, the first female mixed martial arts star. And she's just not very good in it. She's beautiful, a combination of hard (broad shoulders and a strong chin) and soft (stacked and with an bright midwest-style smile). Easy to see why Soderbergh would want to look at her for 90 minutes and why he'd think his audience would want to do the same. There's a shot when, during a hostage-freeing mission in Barcelona, Carano flexes so she can reach and tie that bandana on to her head. Back arched, a brown tank top. She'd make for a great poster. A great movie, not so much.
Carano plays Mallory, an operative for a private black-ops company. She is a machine. During a foot-chase in downtown Barcelona, she runs in that T-1000 style: long strides, calm breathing, and a menacing look. Even an oncoming Peugeot doesn't make her pause. She one-steps over its hood. She knows how to map out extractions and set-up surveillance. The best thing she's at, though, is fighting. Despite her skills, she's -- surprise -- tired of the job and plans to settle quietly in a new apartment in San Diego. There are framed-prints, one of a shooting-range target, a black-silhouette of a man with numbers on his chest, still on the floor and leaning upright against the walls. She's going to quit. Her boss and former-lover Kenneth (Ewan Macgregor) knows that she's thinking that and sees an opportunity to frame her, sell her out for some last cash, and then kill her. Of course, she survives and goes at Kenneth for some revenge.
There's a lot of cool in Soderbergh's crime pieces. A lot of that comes out of the casting of cool people. His troupe includes Cheadle, Pitt, and Cassell. In Ocean's 11, at a Vegas bar with his ex-wife and her new millionaire ex-boyfriend, Clooney's Danny Ocean tells the waitress that he wants "whiskey", his fingers measuring the first inch of the pour, "and whiskey," fingers widening for the second-part of the pour. These guys smirk in Soderbergh's universe, partly out of some self-awareness and partly out of plain fun-having. It's as if the characters all work to the rhythm of the soundtrack, to Dean Martin's "Ain't That a Kick in the Head" or The Isley Brothers doing "It's Your Thing." The guys in Haywire are having some fun, too. Fassbender plays a covert-ops Irishman named Paul. The first time he walks onscreen, in his 3-piece navy-blue suit and brown-leather racing gloves, he pecks Mallory on the lips, already enjoying the game of roleplaying her husband for their mission. The first time we see Channing Tatum, who plays a hotshot colleague of Mallory's named Aaron, he's hungover and on orders from Kenneth to collect Mallory. "Do you serve beer here?" he asks the diner-waitress. He settles for "Just coffee, black," which he promptly throws in Mallory's face.
As larger-than-life as Carano is -- a sheriff calls her Wonder Woman at one point -- she doesn't hold her own in most scenes with her high-end co-stars. They smirk while she's stuck in an affected scowl. Even in Arnold's first role as a feeling-less killer, he made sure to charm. He leaned forward and said, dryly: "I'll be back." With Carano, there's only hard-work and actorly effort as she tries to stay in character. It doesn't help that her voice is high and airy and that much of the early plot is told through her own recollection to a civilian. "Remember Rossborough," she tells him as they escape in an Impreza from Aaron. An important detail in her story. Rossborough is supposed to be an order of much gravitas, but the guy probably chalked it up to bimbo talk.
There's one sequence that actualy works because of Carano's over-effort.
It's during her mission in Ireland with Paul. "I don't wear the dress," she tells Kenneth when he explains that she'd be posing as Paul's wife, one-half of a power couple. There's no passion as they (Mallory and Paul) pretend and check-in at the hotel, Paul still wearing his gloves as he signs them in. And there's even less passion when they're finally alone in the room, prepping in mostly-silence. They clack guns and double-check dossiers. Mallory examines the plastic bags of medicine in the mini-fridge. They have the feel of a longtime married couple still in it for something other than romance. Going through the motions. "Do you mind if I freshen up first?" Paul asks, finally breaking the silence. "Presumably, you'll need more time." As he showers, Mallory plugs his Blackberry to her laptop and bugs it. When it's her time in the bathroom, she makes sure to take her phone with her.
Later that night, after Mallory discovers that Paul is going to double-cross her, she removes her heels as he unlocks their hotel room door. She knows shit's going to go down, but Paul still manages to get the first few shots to the back of her head and gets her in a rear-choke. This fight, like all the others, are mostly in medium shots so the action is clear (the action in Nolan's Batman films, on the other hand, is more chaotic, the camera getting in close so punches and kicks feel clipped and coming from nowhere). And there's no music during these fights so knuckles on skin and bone -- in this scene Paul mounts Mallory and lands about 6 unanswered shots -- sound fresh. There's a seriousness to the violence in Haywire. Before each fight scene, there's suspense in the quiet footsteps, say, of Mallory in the back stairwells of a mansion or of Paul jingling the hotel keys in the lock. And the way Mallory eventually dispatches of Paul is a bit sickening. I'm no soft touch when it comes to movie-violence but there's something of a disconnect here. The violence almost feels -- like Carano's presence -- too serious and too labored for such an otherwise flighty movie.
