Out of Sight, Out of Its Mind

Haywire

** out of ****

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh

Starring: Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum and Michael Douglas

Running time: 93 minutes

Here’s a tip for directors willing to put an unvetted personality as the star and selling point of their latest feature: make sure she has what it takes to carry a scene and sell a line of dialogue with conviction.

Unfortunately, one of the directors who didn’t test these attributes is Steven Soderbergh. Coming off Contagion, his best film in a decade, Soderbergh settles for straight-to-video production values in Haywire, a poorly acted, derivative and misguided revenge picture.

Mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano plays Mallory Kane, a covert spy for the American government. Even though Kane’s throttling strength – drawn from Carano’s own physical finesses – single-handedly takes down baddies during a mission in Barcelona, she is still assigned petty tasks, such as being arm candy to a suave British agent (Michael Fassbender).

However, things go awry when that agent tries to kill Mallory. He sadly miscalculates her velocity. Our salient heroine turns rogue to figure out why she was a target and track down those who tried to eliminate her.

Carano’s got a face and a body that works for a poster and perhaps a 30-second spot, but her monotonous line readings make it hard to feel for her vaguely outlined character.

Surprisingly, the middle-school level performances also stretch to more accomplished actors. Bill Paxton, Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas, all present for 10 minutes or so, seem actively disinterested in their slight parts.

Haywire is a stale thriller that recycles the trope of the lone-wolf assassin pursuing their own form of payback with mixed results. These problems could have been avoided if given a competent action director who knows how to set-up, frame and shoot mano-a-mano combat.

Soderbergh, however, is not the right director for the project. Although the lack of a soundtrack during the fight scenes highlights attention to the raw brutality of the violence, poor editing choices burrow the energy and momentum while the director's static camera simmers the intensity.

Carano has muscle and stamina, but Soderbergh doesn't have a clue on how to approach a fight. When the protagonist and her team go for the kill in Barcelona early in the film, the lead-in to this sequence is composed of jarring colour and tonal shifts, moving from slow-motion to regular speed and from colour to black-and-white.

Not only are these aesthetics, which look like Run Lola Run if directed by Jean-Luc Godard, distracting, but the sequence has no momentum due to the lack of clarity from shot to shot.

From the disjointed story structure to the enigmatic protagonist to the showdown at a house in the hills, Haywire can boast similarities to The Limey, an earlier Soderbergh film also written by Lem Dobbs. But while that 1999 film was a slice of old-school cool, Haywire is a shrugworthy effort.