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| HAYWIRE (2011)
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SBD Star Rating:
by Chiara Adorno
View Credits | See Other Reviews
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Haywire an action-thriller from Director Steven Soderbergh, has received positive reviews from critics. The plot is straight forward. Former Marine and covert ops specialist Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) is betrayed and goes on the run after an assignment turns out to be more complicated than advertised. Using her wits and her fists, she eludes the authorities and villains alike, while trying to clear her name. Gina Carano is best known as a mixed martial arts fighter champion and American Gladiators contestant, and makes her acting debut in this film. The film showcases her kicking and punching such big-screen stars as Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor and Antonio Banderas. The story is told by Mallory in a flurry of flash-backs to a chivalrous kid, Scott (Michael Angarano), whose intervention lands him in a world of mayhem, speeding toward a showdown. James Verniere Boston Herald expresses regret however, stating, "Too bad the movie, an action thriller with roots in the globe-trotting Jason Bourne films and an origami-shaped plot structure like Soderbergh’s award-winning Traffic (2000), is little more than a daisy-chain of MacGuffins held together by pseudo-hard-boiled Robert Ludlum/John LeCarre-style spy-movie dialogue and pulp-noir jibber-jabber." Stella Papamichael Digital Spy praised the action sequences accessing, "What Carano lacks in depth, she makes up for with awesome poise - even while standing still. The action scenes are where she truly excels, running up walls and bounding across rooftops to punish those who betrayed her. She has credibility as an action heroine that is rarely seen on film, even outpunching Uma Thurman in Kill Bill (though Thurman has greater magnetism). Where this film differs from Tarantino's 'rampage of revenge' is in the gritty realist approach as opposed to a comic book aesthetic.... The opening skirmish and a one-on-one with Michael Fassbender as a British agent are especially hard-hitting, but brilliantly shot and choreographed to that end. If only the structure of the story was as robust as Carano, this thriller would have been hard to beat." Joe Neumaier New York Daily News notes the film is, "... clean and no-fuss, and needs more action scenes to match Carano’s game.... Soderbergh avoids any music during the action scenes, a smart, disquieting choice that shows how upper-tier directors, when they do genre flicks (à la Quentin Tarantino, Sam Raimi and Michael Mann), can elevate things instead of letting conventions drag them down." A.O. Scott New York Times had biting things to say about the film, however. He calls the plot "defiantly preposterous and uninteresting." As for the story overall, he says, "nothing is really in doubt, and very little is at stake.... it goes to great lengths to avoid being about anything beyond its immediate situations and effects. It is self-consciously and aggressively trivial, a feast for formalists who sentimentalize the gloriously cheap B-movies of the past." He calls the fighting Carano pretends to do in the film, which she does for real in the ring, "an intriguing curiosity and something of a conceptual puzzle... Once the talking stops and the action begins, her professionalism is very much in evidence and exciting to watch. And yet, somehow, it cannot quite relieve the tedium of a movie that is too cool even to pretend that there is anything worth fighting about." |
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