Haywire.

Hopefully this will be better than the last movie... onwards with 2012, enjoy!

Haywire is a film that went completely under my radar and I honestly don't even know where I heard of it, about the only thing the film tries to push is its cast, which is admittedly really good, it is a thriller or something...

Well the critics liked it at least, apparently it has great pacing, it is well directed, free apparently from shit CGI and has good action with a story full of twists and turns. There has been negativity of course, some have claimed the film a bit convoluted, that the central actress has no charisma (although she does her own stunts, which is neat) and that the film can actually be kind of boring.

What did I think of Haywire? Well, let's dig in!

Haywire shows you a lot, but doesn't really tell you a lot which is extremely problematic at the end, when it's trying to explain everything, everything that I didn't understand or have sunken in, so I was listening, watching, following but not actually understanding, I never felt any investment in this, because all this stuff was happening in front of me and I had no sense of any real context. As far as I can grasp our main character, Mallory, is like a secret agent, come assassin, come elite commando come Government hired mercenary in a small team of similar people. They take part in a hostage rescue mission, which is apparently more important than it seems. She then is teamed up with the mysterious Paul and finds herself in deep, being framed for a murder she didn't commit and having attempts on her life, now she is on a quest to get home with one final table turn before it is all over, why did her co-workers turn on her? Honestly, the film had already lost me before it got to the explanation. The whole movie is basically a flashback as Mallory is driving along with Scott who she tells her life story too because...? Well, I guess he helps her when she is attacked in a diner by one of her co-workers?

The action in this film plays out like a wrestling match, although there are lots of crazy moments, people being chucked around, punched and kicked as everything breaks around them and so on, it lacks any real sense of visceral impact and instead most of the fights play out like elaborate dance sequences. Plus, I guess because she is an MMA fighter, they want to get the technical side, the grappling in but the film also knows that Carano is a babe, so fight scenes are somewhere between elaborate dance sequences and softcorn porn. Around forty minutes in, Mallory and Paul face off in this huge, crazy action scene and from there the action is never quite as good...and we still have an hour left at that point. That is when they started laying on the twists and the film fell more and more flat.

The acting isn't much better, the central performance from the insanely gorgeous Gina Carano is weak at best, but she can fight so I guess I'll let her off in an Arnie kind of way. But the rest of the cast around her, these are established, good actors and yet there is just something so stilted about their performances, I don't know if it is the dialogue, the direction or what. There are some interesting characters though, Paul, especially. He is another operative of undefined nature but sadly he isn't in it very and functions more like a plot device than anything else.

I am inclined to blame more the screenplay, than the direction itself, as Steven Soderbergh is at the helm and he is a well established, good director. He also, as an avid fan of editing, shoots and edits the movie himself too, how that is possible...I don't know, but it shows and not all in a good way. There is a rough clunkiness to a lot of the action scenes, making them look more like behind the scenes footage, than the finished product. We do get some decent cinematography and playing around with the medium at times, but ultimately, this film feels unfinished.

The pacing isn't great either, the action is non stop, there are different kinds of action to keep things interesting, between the gunplay and fisticuffs and...professional wrestling we have the classic intelligence agent, Spook stuff, as people slink around getting Intel, lying to one another and that kind of thing. I just like watching these people work, I just think it is so cool, they all have the same state of mind, they all have their skill sets, it's just cool. But it's just after the first fifty or so minutes, they start throwing in all these twists, the film starts running away and tumbling over itself and none of it was sinking in. It isn't complicated or hard to follow, it just doesn't seem to care much to stop and explain things to the audience.

You could also argue that well.... nothing happens, there is plot, a lot of it too - with the film getting and more complicated as it goes along, but much of it is simply in the background, with much of the centre of the movie simply about Mallory running from one empty scene to the next right until the end, which is rushed as hell.

So do I recommend it? The plot isn't even that complicated - but the film just runs away with itself, stopping rarely to actually explain to you what is going on, which means the story never really sinks in and so you are never truly understanding what is happening. Add the flamboyant, unfinished action sequences on the top and you've got all the packaging of a bad movie. Avoid.

Think About It!

-Locke