Haywire (2012) review

Someone Done Her Wrong. Horrible Mistake.

When you think about it, the phrase “action movie” is a bit redundant. Really, what else are motion pictures for? In the earliest days of cinema our ancestors were thrilled to behold images of galloping horses, hurtling trains and capering dancers. Though our entertainments are now more elaborate, our appetites are not so different. A large part of what we crave is action: running, jumping, fighting, driving, flying. Sometimes everything else — plot, character, emotion — can seem superfluous.

This appears to be the working hypothesis behind “Haywire,” a cold and kinetic experiment in high-impact, low-concept genre filmmaking directed by Steven Soderbergh. Starting with a brawl in a rural roadside diner, the film, written by Lem Dobbs, proceeds through a series of expertly choreographed, meticulously edited scuffles and chases, set pieces threaded around a plot that seems almost defiantly preposterous and uninteresting.

The main character is Mallory Kane, played by the mixed martial arts fighter and “American Gladiators” cast member Gina Carano, making her acting debut. Mallory is a professional black-ops superwarrior (at least I think that’s what her business card says) whose troubles are a reminder of just how dangerous it can be to mix work and romance. To say too much about the guys she deals with would be to risk inflaming the spoiler-sensitive, but her dealings with them frequently end, and sometimes begin, with punches and kicks, though there are also occasional kisses and job interviews.

Mallory is the victim of an elaborate double-cross, which she explains to one of the few men not implicated in it, a young fellow named Scott (Michael Angarano), whose chivalrous intervention in that diner melee plunges him into a welter of mayhem and high-speed exposition. As Mallory drives Scott’s car toward the next showdown, a flurry of flashbacks explains the significance of certain proper nouns, notably Aaron, Paul, Kenneth and Barcelona.

Kenneth (Ewan McGregor) is Mallory’s ex-boyfriend and also her erstwhile employer at a firm that does nasty contract work for the government, here represented by Michael Douglas. Aaron (Channing Tatum) did a job with Mallory in Barcelona, where things got a little complicated. So that takes care of that. Further complications turn out to involve Antonio Banderas and Michael Fassbender (who is Paul, but that’s enough for now). Apart from Scott, the only man Mallory trusts (there are no other women in the world of “Haywire”) is her father (Bill Paxton), a former Marine (as is his daughter) with a wonderfully cinematic and conveniently isolated house in New Mexico.

Another important stop on Mallory’s itinerary of flight and payback is Dublin, scene of an intricate and suspenseful foot chase that serves as Mr. Soderbergh’s critique of current trends in action filmmaking, in particular those associated with the British director Paul Greengrass. Instead of the splintered, speeded-up cutting favored by Mr. Greengrass and his followers — most memorably deployed in the second and third “Bourne” movies, which turned the cities of the world into Google Earth kaleidoscopes of controlled chaos — Mr. Soderbergh builds momentum and uncertainty through extended tracking shots and tight, restricted perspectives. Like Mallory the audience can’t see everything that’s happening and isn’t sure what will happen next.

In another sense, though, nothing is really in doubt, and very little is at stake. Unlike the “Bourne” films, whose baroque webbing of plot and counterplot suggested an allegory of global paranoia, “Haywire” goes to great lengths to avoid being about anything beyond its immediate situations and effects. It is self-consciously and aggressively trivial, a feast for formalists who sentimentalize the gloriously cheap B-movies of the past.

Nowadays everyone must love (or at least pretend to love) pleasures that were supposedly once disdained or taken for granted: dive bars, street food, trashy films. But knowing, sophisticated attempts to replicate those things often traffic in their own kind of snobbery, confusing condescension with authenticity. Movies like “The American,” “Drive” and now “Haywire” offer strained pulp, neither as dumb as we want them to be nor as smart as they think they are, and not, in the end, all that much fun.

There is no doubting Mr. Soderbergh’s skill or the sincerity of his interest in some of the technical problems of postmodern cinema. And “Haywire” explores interesting questions about the nature of acting. Ms. Carano does, strictly speaking, very little of it. Her expressions run the gamut from glower to pout, and her features give little indication of her character’s inner state.

This is partly consistent with Mallory’s guardedness, but her blankness also contrasts with the nimble, slick pretending of Ms. Carano’s male co-stars. Their professionalism manifests itself in different ways — Mr. McGregor and Mr. Douglas are practiced hams, while Mr. Fassbender prefers to keep kosher — but in each case there is a fascinating awkwardness to their encounters with Ms. Carano, who is a more purely physical screen presence. (She and Mr. Tatum, on the other hand, have the chemistry of shared clumsiness.)

The fighting that Ms. Carano and her co-stars pretend to do in “Haywire” is something she has done more or less for real, which makes her performance, like the porn star Sasha Grey’s in Mr. Soderbergh’s “Girlfriend Experience,” an intriguing curiosity and something of a conceptual puzzle. Once the talking stops and the action begins, her professionalism is very much in evidence and exciting to watch. And yet, somehow, it cannot quite relieve the tedium of a movie that is too cool even to pretend that there is anything worth fighting about.

“Haywire” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Strong action and rough talk.

HAYWIRE

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh; written by Lem Dobbs; production design by Howard Cummings; music by David Holmes; costumes by Shoshana Rubin; produced by Gregory Jacobs and Ryan Kavanaugh; released by Relativity Media. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes.

WITH: Gina Carano (Mallory Kane), Ewan McGregor (Kenneth), Michael Fassbender (Paul), Michael Douglas (Coblenz), Channing Tatum (Aaron), Antonio Banderas (Rodrigo), Bill Paxton (Mr. Kane), Michael Angarano (Scott) and Mathieu Kassovitz (Studer).
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 21, 2012


A film review on Friday about “Haywire,” starring Gina Carano, misidentified her role on the television show “American Gladiators.” She was a member of the gladiator cast, not a contestant.