WOMAN ON TOP
Gina Carano, a retired mixed martial arts champion, possesses the distinctive ability to hold both a gun and a stunning evening dress with the same panache. She has thighs that evoke chuckles of admiration and steely dark eyes which reveal much more than her impassive face. While watching Steven Soderbergh's Haywire, one wondered whether the maverick filmmaker stumbled upon his heroine before he found a script to suit her.
This is firmly B-movie territory and much of the logic in the screenplay has been conveniently inserted only to tie up ends without making too much sense. It doesn't matter. Unlike most recent action movies which rely heavily on SFX for their thrills, Ms. Carano's one-on-one encounters with various gorgeous men she beats to pulp during the course of the film are pure delight. Because she does her own stunts and keeps the action very close to the realm of the believable.
She's Mallory Kane a shadowy super-agent cast in the Bourne tradition and hunted by her own. "You shouldn't think of her as a woman," her creepy boss (played by Ewan McGregor) cautions. Clues to her predicament are sprinkled across recent assignments in Barcelona and Dublin, but first there's an opening bone-cruncher in an upstate New York diner where Mallory pounds her six-foot plus colleague/adversary before escaping with an unsuspecting youth who becomes her unwilling confidante.
While the motives remain fuzzy right till the end, you can see the suspense a mile away and still don't care. Neither do Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, McGregor and Michael Fassbender who willingly play along. Can you imagine say a Shah Rukh Khan or Saif Ali Khan getting decimated by a heroine in a Hindi film? Nah! Our boys are just too macho for that.
Sleekly shot and edited by the director himself with campy music which so reminds you of the Ocean's series, Haywire is a great one-time watch and all thanks to its killer heroine.
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