Film Review: Haywire (2011)

By Aaron Jankowski

Haywire is the beginning of something beautiful.

Though, it is a very rough, sometimes painful beginning to say the least. Haywire is most definitely the beginning of a promising new action hero career for Gina Carano.

Written by Lem Dobbs and directed by Steven Soderbergh, Haywire is an action movie in the vein of the Jason Bourne franchise. No, there is no memory loss involved (in spite of the audience’s presumable will to forget they paid for this.)

Mallory, played by acting newcomer and MMA fighter Carano, is a top notch mercenary working for a private contractor. I am sure you can guess the rest, but I’ll lay it out for you anyways. 

Mallory has been double crossed by her boss and is hell bound to find out why. We are then sent on a 90 min spree of dodging the police, fighting and not a lot of character development.

The movie opens with Mallory waiting for her boss, Kenneth, played by Ewan McGregor, in a coffee shop. Instead of Kenneth, she is met by another one of Kenneth’s mercenaries, Aaron, played by Channing Tatum.

What we get here is our first look at Carano’s acting, but more importantly, our first look at what we all came to see – her kick some ass.

After getting into a fight with Aaron, Mallory escapes the scene with the help of a bystander and his car. Mallory uses the young man as a sounding board as she tells him what has happened to her leading up to the meeting. When Mallory tells her story to the young man, we get to see what happened, as the films timeline jumps from her mission in Barcelona, where she was to save a hostage, to a mission in Dublin where she runs into another mercenary, played by Michael Fassbender, up until the present.

Haywire plays out much the way you would imagine it would. 

There are government agents trying to cut deals to catch the bigger fish, sexual and romantic motives and lots of killing.

The fights in Haywire are exceptional. They may take a second to get used to because they are not at all as stylized as a lot of fights in films today. Instead, they are very technical and determined. One of the best decisions made in this film was to cut the music during Carano’s bouts. This adds more impact to the sound of flesh on flesh and makes the battles feel rawer and almost uncomfortable, as if the fight had really broken out right in front of you. Her background in MMA is obvious as she brings a lot of grabs and takedowns to the fights. This combination makes Haywire’s bouts like no others I’ve seen in a while.

Though the lack of score helped accent the violence in the movie, the music’s presence throughout the movie is awkward. 

It is very bass driven and all sounds like it is a rock version of classic porn grooves. The constant driving bass gives every scene the same amount of urgency which I do not think was intended.

Haywire wasn’t filmed the way most action movies are either. 

Soderbergh used a lot of odd angles and obscured shots to capture the characters when they were speaking, then sat back at a comfortable distance and just watched as they fought. It was a relief to not have the camera jumping all over the place as you were trying to get engaged in both the dialogue and the violence.

It would appear the idea for Haywire was to surround Carano with great actors (which they did, the cast boasts not only McGregor and Fassbender, but Michael Douglas and Antonio Banderas) in hopes they could help rise the newcomers abilities. However, as the adage goes, you are only as strong as your weakest link, and Carano was the weakest link, as to be expected.

But with a typical action movie script, full of cheese and cliché, no one was going to come out of Haywire with any awards or high praise.

That said, Carano showed she knew what she was doing, and I would not be surprised to see her again, and soon.

SCORE: 4/10
ACTING: 6/10
EFFECTS/VISUAL: 6/10
WRITING:5/10
DIRECTING: 8/10
OVERALL: 29/50

TAKE AWAY THOUGHT: Haywire has a major saving grace in not taking itself too seriously. Because of this, there are a few genuine laughs which come as a major surprise. I recommend seeing this movie on DVD simply so you can say you were there when Gina Carano, Hollywood’s newest action hero, was born.