From the cuts between time differentiated by the presence of bruises and broken bones, to the seamless transitions from black and white shootouts to crimson-tinted, slow-motion shots of the prelude and aftermath of carnage, Haywire is vintage Soderbergh – perhaps most in its minimalistic qualities. There are plenty of aesthetic touches and attention paid to detail, whether it be the previous list or Mallory’s day-for-night-shot ambush on Kenneth (Ewan McGregor), or the nicotine-yellow-stained scenes that demarcate the few miles beyond the Mexican border that play host to the penultimate revenge scene.
For all that it is visually, Haywire is not an exercise in acting. It’s more like a brief stretch before a 10k. The best-delivered lines, unsurprisingly, come from Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas, and Michael Fassbender, but their present in the best scenes – apart from Douglas – are as foils for Mallory (Gina Carano), the woman somebody mistakenly done wrong, but “it’s best not to think of her as a woman…that would be a mistake.” A woman skilled in cover black ops, Mallory certainly is, but an actress, Carano is not – at least, not yet. Ninety-five percent of the lines she delivers are in the form of a question, whether it’s actually a question or not, and those that aren’t are strangely stressed as if spoken intentionally from the diaphragm of a thespian hoping that each syllable is clearly enunciated. Take for example Mallory’s surprise that “MI 6 wants me to be eye candy?” Here, the presumed “me” goes unstressed, instead existing as part of the steady vocal incline from the “a” in “wants” to the forced lilt in “candy.”
This can often be distracting, particularly when her dialog is exchanged with Aaron (Channing Tatum), another super soldier and her first victim, but if you’ve gone to see Haywire for the acting and the transparent theme that occasionally circles back around to how people exist in a metaphysical assembly line that generates mounds of capital for and unseen someone in an uncertain somewhere where mercenaries exist in a corporate world constructed on euphemisms like “immunity language,” “pay structure,” and “hazard bumps,” then you’ve missed out on the best parts of the movie. What Haywire lacks in traditional performance, it makes up for in both aesthetics and killer action sequences. In truth, there’s very little revolutionary in the fight sequences, but it feels novel because Carano brings a startling realism to the oft-rehashed role of “black operative killing machine.”
As the face of Female MMA, Gina Carano is the only American woman to ever win a Muay Thai championship outside of the United States, and if you’ve seen any of her fights, it’s easy to see how. She can be a bruiser, but most often her strengths are her quickness and instinct, two things that Soderbergh employs when filming Mallory’s battles. As opposed to the ubiquitous quick cuts and sped-up footage, Haywire offers wide angle tracking shots that exhibit Carano’s physical abilities. There are cuts, but they occur when the action crashes from one room to the next, and not to provide the editor with an easy segue from the stunt double to a close up of the lead player sweating and panting. Most awesomely, when Carano gets hit or hits a surface – both of which she does rather often, which humanizes her as opposed to creating an indestructible cyborg – the camera follows her body and its instinct to position itself for subsequent combat.
Clearly, many of the scenes need to have been choreographed, but I’m going to bet that it was more for the non-MMA fighters’ benefits more so than Carano’s. I’m certain she wasn’t given free reign, but Soderbergh’s continuous takes allow the viewer to bask in the phenomena that are Carano’s organic movements and natural instincts. Even her overhead-camera-shot dash from rooftop to roof top is fluid and seamless; it lacks cuts and brief close-ups to mask discontinuity and visual peccadillos.
The story is basic, the action-top notch, the theme regurgitated, but Haywire is what Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Salt, Wanted, or even the Bourne franchise could have been. I enjoyed most of the previous list, but there were always those moments when the camera created the action – a quick cut here, a slow-motion manipulation of a distracting bullet, a flash of indiscernible body parts there. Here, there’s almost a guilty joy and admiration in watching Carano and Fassbender, McGregor, or Tatum battle it out.
