By Erin Free
The is-he-or-isn’t-he-retired Steven Soderbergh jumps from genre to genre with such seeming reckless abandon that it often looks like he’s just trying to prove that he can do, well, anything. From Oscar-bait drama (Traffic, Erin Brockovich) and experimentalism (Bubble) to mainstream thrills (Contagion) and comedy (Magic Mike), and even sci-fi (Solaris), Soderbergh delivers just about every time.
With the pulsating espionage thriller, Haywire, the director even succeeded in discovering a new movie action hero in the shapely form of Mixed Martial Arts fighter, Gina Carano, who announced herself as a dazzling big screen presence as Mallory Kane, a black ops agent who seeks revenge after she is betrayed by her colleagues, played by Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, and Channing Tatum.
Tough, controlled and extraordinarily agile, Carano is the real deal, and Soderbergh taps her for all she’s worth, staging a series of eye-popping fight scenes. Her knock-down-drag-out slab of battery with Fassbender is a literal masterpiece of on-screen hand-to-hand combat. “Gina’s pretty hardcore,” Fassbender told FilmInk. “She was like, ‘Throw me into that harder.’ And I was like, ‘Gina, this is acting! We’re dealing with illusion here.’”
But it’s this immersion from Carano into the fight sequences (she worked with the stunt team on their choreography) that gives Haywire its sense of urgency and authenticity. “I wasn’t there to hurt anybody,” the actress told FilmInk. “The stunt crew had told me, ‘You’re going to be the stunt girl and the lead actress. You have two jobs.’ Usually they rely on the stunt people to take care of the actors. But I was playing both of those roles. It wasn’t really hard to do because all these actors wanted to do everything themselves. There’s not one thing that they didn’t want to do. Even when they were off camera, they wanted to do everything themselves. I don’t know if that’s normal with films, but I got pretty lucky with some pretty great guys.”
The fight sequences are even better because Soderbergh does it all without the benefit of rapid editing. He keeps his camera still, and just lets the fights unfold, with amazing results. Complexly plotted and paced like a runaway freight train, Haywire is an ice cold thriller from a true master.
