Haywire

Haywire had me hooked. The preview made it seem like an action-packed movie with a decent storyline. The preview, as many have been recently, did not prepare me for the movie I saw. What I saw was a slow-moving plot, with some often short action sequences. Similar to last year's The Debt, only The Debt did it with style and energy. And the plot was thick and interesting enough to keep us involved. Unfortunately for Haywire, the plot was not as thick or interesting as Soderbergh had hoped. This caused the movie to seem like an indie take on the Bourne series. And it turned out exactly as it sounds: weird and pretty pointless. Why would anyone want to try and take on something that was near perfection like the Bourne series and mess with it?

Beginning in the middle of the story of a black ops agent, Mallory (Gina Carano), seeking retribution after she is betrayed the movie had potential. I was ready to be taken on a roller coaster journey to figure out why she was betrayed. The flashbacks were great. Everything about them fit and moved the plot along. Even the way the flashbacks were presented was interesting and pretty fresh and fun to watch. However, once we catch up to "present time" the story loses a lot of what it had going for it, surprise and some mystery. Luckily I wasn't expecting the plot to blow me out of the water, but I did expect a lot more action.

Gina Carano, most notable as an MMA fighter or in her role on "American Gladiators", was a decent actress for starring in her first feature film. Obviously a fighter-turned-actress won't be a perfect actress, but for who her character was she did the character justice. She's really the only character worth noting. Aside from Kenneth: Ewan McGregor who, as always, gave a good performance. Mallory is the only character we see more of 5-10 minutes on the screen, which was strange because this was supposed to be a revenge thriller, which needs a plethora of well developed characters to be compelling.

While her acting might not have been up to par, her fighting in the few hand-to-hand action sequences was exquisite, though sometimes it felt over-choreographed. Like the actors had rehearsed it one too many times. This could have been because Carano could probably have easily taken any of the stuntmen or actors and not thought anything of it. Her fighting at times looked as stiff as Christian Bale's Batman in the opening of The Dark Knight, but when it didn't it was amazing to watch what she could do.

Another thing to note was the music. It tried to evoke feelings of film noir and other movies similar to that genre. The only problem: this wasn't film noir. It was a revenge story lacking much of the substance its' colleagues normally bring to the plate. The music could have added a lot here, but instead it only played over montages and some chase scenes. The music did cut out during most of the fight scenes as did most other sound effects besides the contact, which made them seem more intense.

Soderbergh tried too hard to turn Mallory into a new Jason Bourne and it didn't work the way he wanted it to. He made a decent movie, not action-packed, and slightly slow-moving. Haywire wasn't a complete loss though: the fights were fun to watch, though there could have been more of them, and until we catch up to "present time" the movie is awesome. Those things don't make up for the rest of the problems in this movie.

Worth seeing once.

5/10