DON'T MESS WITH HER
It’s good to know that Angelina Jolie (Lara Croft, Salt) and Uma Thurman (Kill Bill) are not the only actresses doing action parts. When once Modesty Blaise and Charlie’s Angels were more like curiosities, this is the age of the kickass heroine Lisbeth Salander (the Dragon Tattoo girl). It makes business sense too to have more women out there, kicking, stomping, shooting, so directors are not averse to having women at the centre of the action.
In Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire, the sleek newcomer Gina Carano as Mallory Kane, skilled covert operative for hire, revels in thrashing a series of men, and without much help of CGI either. The premise is quite common in this genre—the protagonist is betrayed and hunted by her own people and needs all the skills at her disposal to survive, figure out who is after her skin and take revenge. All this cannot happen without some international globetrotting and a lot of violence. That Gina Carano is a trained mixed martial arts fighter, helps her look good and convincing in the fight scenes. It also helps that she is supported by a last of biggies that includes Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum. Some of them submit to a thrashing by Mallory, who looks like she could take on an army all by herself.
Soderbergh, always a good craftsman and DOP, makes an enjoyable spy thriller, that may not turn out to be a classic of the genre, but is worth the price of a ticket or DVD. Even with a template in hand, screenwriter Lem Dobbs fashions a fairly convoluted piece of work, with double-crossing, intrigue, who-done-what-and-why always bubbling under the sizzling action, all done with a revving pace and dry wit.
Carano’s energy and physicality is amazing; because she is not Jolie-sexy with bee-stung pout and sleepy eyes, she makes all that she does believable even in the crazy, suspend-disbelief world of the B-movie thriller.
Haywire is not going to win the director or the lead actress any Oscars, but if Gina Carano does not make it big as an action star, there’s something wrong with the world... with Hollywood in any case.
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