Haywire (***)

These are good times for ass-kicking movie heroines. While Saoirse Ronan in Hanna, Zoe Saldana in Columbiana, or Angelina Jolie in Salt may have convincingly looked the part, Gina Carano is the real deal, a mixed-martial-arts fighter in her first starring role, in a Steven Soderbergh film as it happens. So maybe she could really knock around Channing Tatum, as she does in an opening scene that teases the audience by setting it up so that her character, Mallory, seems like the victim of an abusive boyfriend. But Mallory, an operative for a government contractor doing high-risk undercover jobs, gives as good as she gets (better, actually), whether she’s outrunning a kidnapper in Barcelona, nearly destroying a hotel room in Dublin, or fleeing the police in upstate New York.

You’ll recognize Soderbergh’s hand if you’ve seen his Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels, or Traffic, or The Limey, his previous collaboration with screenwriter Lem Debs. Note the way, when Mallory and her team go into a building, guns blazing,  tones down the artillery he noise and turns up the music instead, opting for panache over thunder. Style points don’t quite overcome what is still essentially a genre exercise. The non-linear structure, confusing at first, doesn’t quite hide a familiar plot. The Limey, for one, has richer characters, even if this film has some well-known actors (Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton) in small roles. And Hanna had a fairy-tale quality that made me overlook its basic implausibility. But this film does boast the best rooftop foot chase sequence since The Bourne Ultimatum. Its fight scenes are very good if you don’t insist on strict reality. I imagine even MMA champions wouldn’t get up so quickly from a couple of the blows inflicted here.


IMDb link

viewed 1/16/12 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 1/16/12 and 1/19/12