Writer: Lem Dobbs
Genre: Action
1.5 Cookies
The
main problem with Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire
is that there isn’t enough of a story to excuse the lack of action. Also, when
there isn’t fighting going on, all you want is for the characters to stop
talking and start punching. Soderbergh, who has directed such films as Traffic, Ocean’s 11, and Contagion
is a really interesting, occasionally brilliant visual director but with Haywire I felt like he was trying way
too hard to be cool, and it makes him look like a fool.
The
incoherent and unnecessarily confusing story deals with a very tough female spy
or something named Mallory and her quest to get revenge on Ewan McGregor after
he double crosses her and tries to have her killed. Gina Carano, who is an
actual Mixed Martial Arts fighter, plays Mallory and this makes sense because
she’s good at fighting, but not so good at acting. When she’s beating up
Channing Tatum or random police officers, it’s fun to watch but when she has to
deliver a line of dialogue instead of a kick, it’s cringe worthy. The plot unfolds
in a way that you don’t really know what’s going on until the end, and in this
case that is not a good thing. Ewan McGregor, who I usually like, was simply
annoying in Haywire, along with most
of the other cast members like Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas. It’s hard
to act well when you don’t have a good script to work with, I guess.
There
was one sequence that did stand out though, and raises the movie from a 1
cookie rating to a 1.5 cookie rating alone. Michael Fassbender, who I think
ranks just a notch below Ryan Gosling on the coolest actors list, has an
awesome fight scene with Carano that is so good I wish it was in a better movie
so I would want to watch it again. Unfortunately, Fassbender only has about 10
minutes of screen time and the other 80 minutes are dull and repetitive and
disorderly. If someone makes a cut of Haywire
that edits out everything but the fight scenes, it might make a cool 20 minute
short, but the version is theaters now is definitely not worth the price of
admission, or the time, or the gas money to get to the theater.
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