Haywire Movie Review [8.2/10]
Haywire - Review
Review by Freep.com
Gina Carano has a face that can hold a Hollywood close-up and a fist that can hold your nose until it comes clean off.
Steven Soderbergh cast this mixed martial arts star and model in “Haywire” and surrounded her with experienced actors because he wanted to see an action movie starring a woman who can handle all the guys who get in her way.
Carano holds her own in this sauntering, multi-city film, which is slyly funny at times as various men (Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender) in the spy game underestimate agent Mallory Kane (Carano). Or don’t underestimate her.
Kane, working as a private contractor for Kenneth (McGregor), has been set up. She’s trying to figure out who betrayed her. Was it Kenneth? The government guy, Coblenz (Michael Douglas), who uses Kenneth’s team? Rodrigo, the mysterious Spaniard (Antonio Banderas)?
Review by Chicago Reader
Steven Soderbergh has announced that he’ll soon retire from directing to become a painter, and this international thriller—his 23rd feature since 1989—registers as the work of someone who’s become both very good at and very bored with his job. Mixed-martial-arts fighter Gina Carano stars as a freelance commando who goes rogue after being double-crossed by her employers, her gender providing the only antidote to a crushingly generic plot. There’s a good deal of pleasure to be had in the clockwork precision of her hand-to-hand combat, which Soderbergh often shoots in profile to showcase her wall-climbing backflips.
Review by Film.com
You know, when someone decided that mixed martial arts champion Gina Carano should be a movie star, it would have been easy to showcase her fighting skills in some brainless, slapped-together action flick. That’s been the practice with plenty of other athletes-turned-actors, and it makes a certain amount of business sense. Why waste a good screenplay and a good director on someone who might not be a good actor?
But Haywire shows that our mothers were right: anything worth doing is worth doing well. Carano, indeed, is nothing special as an actress — but darned if it matters when she’s supported by a killer screenplay, a sharp cast, and Steven Soderbergh’s unmistakably sly, mordant direction. They could have put a robot in the lead (as long as it could fight) and still ended up with a blissfully entertaining 93 minutes of butt-kicking and snark.
Carano plays Mallory Kane, a highly skilled mercenary who works for an unnamed company that is frequently contracted by the U.S. government to perform sensitive, dangerous missions like hostage extractions. But we don’t know any of that at first.
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