HAYWIRE

Steven Soderbergh delivers unconventional movies even with conventional material.  Here is a punch-kick-punch movie about 'one last job' and 'who sold us out damn it!' but of course, since it's Soderbergh, there are unusual choices: fractured chronology, smooth jazz score and a non-actor as the lead.  Mixed Martial Arts star Gina Carano debuts admirably if not woodenly as an action star who looks much more credible beating people's asses than the average underfed Hollywood starlet.  Despite being called Haywire, the movie is unfortunately inert and somehow feels like less than the sum of its interesting but not altogether arresting parts.

The plot is pretty simple even though the movie makes it complicated.  Gina Carano plays a former marine who works for a freelance Badass Squad, but after disastrous double crosses on jobs in Barcelona and Dublin, she has to figure out who wants her dead and why; there are only about 3 suspects and most of them did it, so the focus is not on crafting an engrossing mystery.  She punches or talks to Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, and a few other dudes.  She also spends the first half of the film explaining stuff to some kids whose car she stole, but it doesn't really make anything clearer.

Everything makes sense once the ass-beatings start getting handed out.  Right from the start, we see fights that are dirty and mean, with lots of face punching, choking, and hot coffee throwing.  No mega jump kicks off rooftops or umbrella fights atop exploding fire engines here.  The fights are realistic looking, brutal, and perfectly paced throughout, which helps bump the movie up to somewhere between 'interesting failure' to 'boring experiment.'  I was vaguely curious what would happen next as the events unfolded, but once the credits rolled, a profound feeling of 'Meh, so what?' swept over the theater.

She'll beat your ass and you'll love it

~ Mallory Kane is the kind of generic spyjinks name that inspired the name Lana Kane on Archer.

~ Michael Douglas and Antonio Banderas probably talked about Catherine Zeta-Jones.

~ I'm glad to see that Michael Douglas is back from the dead and still acting.

~ Bill Paxton plays Carano's father, a Tom Clancy-ish author of military fiction living in New Mexico; he gets one great wordless scene where he sees exactly what it is his daughter does for a living.

~ You won't be able to use the old 'Narrowed It Down To The Guy I Recognize' in this movie because everybody is well known.

~ Studio executives were baffled by this film, taking so long to re-edit it (and dub Carano with another actress, possibly Laura San Giacomo) that Soderbergh had time to film and release Contagion, which was a vastly superior experiment.  Go watch Contagion.  It's like Outbreak by way of The Day of The Jackal.