Haywire | Film review

More than anything Steven Soderbergh has made in at least a decade, Haywire seems hard-wired to elate. Approximating the sleek pleasures of Out of Sight and The Limey—his twin pinnacles of late-’90s cool—this jazzy genre riff sends a skilled contract soldier (MMA fighter Gina Carano) racing across two continents after she’s double-crossed on assignment. It plays like one of buddy Tony Gilroy’s Jason Bourne scenarios, except that Soderbergh, working in a pure action mode for the first time, adopts the stylistic antithesis of Paul Greengrass’s urgency-by-way-of-shakycam. From a stealthy escape through the streets of Dublin to the film’s various bouts of hand-to-hand combat, the widescreen set pieces have been staged for optimal holy-shit-how’d-she-do-that? visibility.

The script was penned by Limey screenwriter Lem Dobbs, who’s apparently gotten over the way Soderbergh turned his hard-boiled revenge thriller into a nonlinear meditation on memory and regret. Haywire possesses some of that film’s jumbled chronology but almost none of its gravitas, mostly because it’s anchored to a much less soulful performance. As an actor, Carano proves inexpressive—her line readings tend toward monotone—but she’s perfectly cast as a body in motion. Working her way to the New Mexico home of her retired father (a mustached Bill Paxton, playing Dennis Farina to Carano’s J. Lo), our heroine metes out periodic, acrobatic ass-kickings to an assortment of A-listers with bad haircuts.

As in much of his recent work, Soderbergh interrogates the uneasy relationship between government and private industry. Mostly, though, he just blisses out—on globe-trotting spy games, stunt-driven spectacle and the graceful physicality of his nonprofessional star. After ten-plus years of admirable but sometimes overreaching experiments, it’s refreshing to see one of our premier ambassadors of cinematic suavity get his groove back.