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

Tell No One (***1/2)

A French adaptation of a novel by American Harlan Coben, Tell No One is a thriller for people who don’t think of the term as synonymous with car chases. Instead, there’s a an excellent foot chase, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The hero is a doctor (François Cluzet) whose wife and childhood sweetheart has apparently been murdered. Yet, eight years later, he receives a tantalizing e-mail suggesting she may yet be alive, yet trying to learn the truth may invite danger. At the same time, the police find new evidence that they think suggests that he may have been the one responsible for her death. It’s hard to see how all these events link up, and the movie moves along on threads that seem disparate for quite a while. Yet the end brings them together in a satisfying, even modestly touching, way. Among the supporting cast are Nathalie Baye as the doctor’s lawyer, and Kristen Scott Thomas as a friend.

For my money, Woody Allen’s Match Point is still the best-plotted recent film of this type, while another recent French one, Roman de Gare, is a little stronger on character. Both of those films are slightly artier than this, so some people may prefer it. For me, there’s a slight inelegance in relying on a long exposition by one character to explain everything, as well as the doctor’s conveniently having a criminal acquaintance at his disposal. But I quibble; overall, this is a top-notch, unpretentious suspense drama, which earned César awards for Cluzet and director Guillaume Canet.

IMDB link

viewed 7/23/08 at Ritz 5; reviewed 7/28/08