Haywire: Punch, Kick, Choke - Repeat!

Does Haywire welcome Gina Carano to the illustrious pantheon of Van Damme, Norris and Segal, or is it just The Girlfriend Experience with fists? Carano, an ex-MMA fighter and American Gladiatrix, is Mallory Kane, a highly competent private contractor. And as anyone who's seen an action movie in the past forty years, or even read the news, knows what happens to the competent. They get set up. So, from the opening scene, when Mallory sits down in a roadside diner, we know things will go wrong. Coffee cups will be smashed. Arms will be broken. And more, as Mallory choke-holds her way to the truth. This involves tenderizing such illustrious co-stars as Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum and Antonio Banderas. Carano might not be able to match their acting. The further out she is from imminent physical contact, the flatter her vocal delivery becomes, until she starts to sound like Sasha Grey. But she tops them in the action. Soderbergh keeps the camera fairly steady during all of the fights, so the chain of cause and effect between motion and outcome is always clear, and the natural ability of Carano's body can be appreciated. It's worth it for those scenes, even if the story seems slight and the retro-genre-fantastic score overstates the case.

A few random notes: First, I appreciated the scene where Mallory took off her ridiculous formal heels in order to fight. Second, I didn't realize how few actresses this movie had, apart from its female star, until I started to list her co-stars. Apart from some random extras in some scenes, Mallory/Gina Carano is the only woman in this movie. She works with men, under a man, who is hired by two other men. She hijacks a car from a male hostage, and she has no mother, just a father. Perhaps the key to all this is what her boss says in an important scene - that it would be a mistake to think of Mallory as a woman. Whatever her sex, the movie shows a world in which she's somehow gendered as male, for all of her conventional female attractiveness. Finally, in a post on Haywire's trailer, a friend told me that Gina Carano is the Danica Patrick of the MMA world. Ouch. I'll concede that she may be. After all, I don't watch MMA and won't start until either the end times come or I start caring about baseball. However, even if she's not the most-skilled fighter out there, she still seems strong enough, flexible enough and muscular enough to do what she does in this movie.