I watched Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire less than 24 hours ago, and I’m already having trouble remembering exactly what the picture was about – some gobbledygook about private government contractors double-crossing one another, with one rogue special-ops agent targeted for knowing too much, or for the appeasement of her vengeful ex-boyfriend/employer, or something like that.
But I remember in vivid detail the blue light piercing through the window of a diner in the opening sequence, the urine-yellow filter over a scene of the agents planning their latest job, the crepuscular light fading toward darkness in one of the final scenes, and the director’s switch from black-and-white to color in an intellectually thrilling chase scene.
Haywire is only the latest style-over-substance success story, wherein the director’s rigorous formalism pummels every shred of distinction from Lem Dobb’s functional screenplay. Dobbs’ words essentially become the primer over which Soderbergh paints the movie in whatever dazzling hue he has in mind. The result is not as emotionally investing as Drive, but it’s cut from a similar cloth, and it’s probably more fun.
Beneath the color-coded visions lies a candy-flavored action vehicle for 29-year-old mixed-martial-artist Gina Carano as Mallory, an unstoppable secret agent whom, for whatever their reasons, pretty much every male character in the movie wants to kill. These include Ewan McGregor as an ex-boyfriend and sometimes boss; Michael Fassbender as her supposed partner with a malicious secret; and Antonio Banderas, sporting the ridiculous unkempt beard of a deposed dictator, as the apparent head honcho.
Again, I did not know, or care, what was really going on, and I don’t think Soderbergh did when he was filming it. Haywire is not Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, not by a long shot. Soderbergh’s goal, instead, is to pare down the spy film to its bare essence, avoiding the over-plotted clutter that drives everything from talky features to hour-long episodes of Burn Notice. Dialogue is at an absolute minimum, and even sound design is stripped entirely from the aforementioned chase scene, propelled only by the director’s inspired imagery and a coolly calculated score.
This is a movie infatuated with its own movieness, and spy-movie history. In Soderbergh’s stylized vision of international intrigue, names and locations – Paul, Barcelona, Dublin – are employed more for their aesthetic associations than their physical importance; it sounds hip and exotic to think of these exciting people bouncing across the globe, when in fact the entire film was shot in just two locales.
Symbols of seeming significance are breached only to be subsumed by the style: Soderbergh has a lot of fun exhibiting and then disregarding various Hitchcockian MacGuffins, such as a silver pendant and a captured Chinese whistleblower, both of them chicken feed in the grand scheme of things, which is to jettison grand schemes.
At the risk of sounding too much like a film theorist, let it be said that Haywire is an enjoyable mainstream movie even if you don’t buy in to Soderbergh’s intent. Straight men could do a lot worse than watch the sexy Carano kick ass with acrobatic aplomb; she’s not asked to employ much range, but this role will likely lead, at least, to a thriving career as athletic eye candy.
The fight scenes are simply and imaginatively choreographed, and they actually make sense from one edit to the next, something that can’t be said for a majority of fix-it-in-post actioners (the recently opened import Heir Apparent: Largo Winch comes to mind). And it ends on an ellipsis, following an essential rule of show business: Leave ‘em wanting more.
HAYWIRE. Director: Steven Soderbergh; Cast: Gina Carano, Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas; Distributor: Relativity Media; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at most theaters