Haywire (Steven Soderbergh, 2012): USA

Reviewed by Brittany Carr. Viewed at AFI fest 2011.

Haywire was a surprise, it had fabulous oneliners and captured the audience’s attention throughout the film. Gina Carano who plays Mallory Kane, her character is a former marine with her new job as a special ops hired gun. During the Q & A’s, Steven Soderbergh reveled to the audience that he bascially formed this film after seeing actress Gina in her former life as a MMA fighter on NBC.

Soderbergh’s use of the camera and props were excellent. For the action sequences there wasn’t a headache of a hand-held camera that was shaky through the whole scene like in any of the Bourne movies, but instead the camera followed the action and had smooth transitions between view points for the audience to see and understand what is doing on. The lighting was appropriate with the time of day, so there wasn’t any unnatural lighting that could be seen, and the costumes were simple, leather, natural fibers with sophisticated furniture. (When you see actual furniture that is.)

It all started in Barcelona, when a special hostage rescue mission is completed but upon returning home, she is given a mission that leads Mallory into a trap on an attempt on her life. From this point in the film, she is fighting for her life, and figuring out why her employer wants her dead, all without being captured. “They gave her no choice,” says the movie poster, but after seeing the film, that line makes complete sense. For Gina’s very first film, I thought she did a really great job, her character didn’t require a lot of emotion, because her character was a hard-ass who would kill you if she needed to, so she was no push-over. The martial arts used in this film were amazingly choreographed, but many of the action movies out today have all the same fighting movies. But in Haywire, all the fight scenes had martial arts moves I had never seen on silver screen. I really enjoyed the film, even though Soderbergh made the film just for kicks, I will probably still recommend the film to friends, it was a different type of female action movie, and that was the best part!