HAYWIRE

*** (out of ****)

 

In this day and age, what with the economy and the internet filled with 99 percenters and streaming videotape, it’s getting harder and harder for entertainers to earn Lifetime Passes. When you give someone a Lifetime Pass, that doesn’t mean that you will like everything they do for the rest of their career, but it at least means you’ll make an effort to go see it. I’m sure that there are people who will continue to buy Bruce Springsteen’s newest albums long after he stopped being the greatest rock and roll star of all time, or go see every Will Smith movie, even though he eventually will only make sequels to Wild Wild West and Six Degrees of Separation. But for the most part, audiences are getting better at writing people off when they feel like they’ve been fucked over one too many times, Transformers fans notwithstanding. We have too much shit to do. There’s too much good media, with all of it too accessible, to waste our time watching the same stupid garbage over and over again. So we revoke Lifetime Passes, or never hand them out in the first place. American Reunion will earn much more money than it should have (not everyone is getting smarter), but much less than the third one, because, ever so slowly, people are wiping the drool off their chin, putting their cake down, and saying “No, American Pie movies. I’m not going to let you take my time and money anymore.”

 

 

I’ve all but abandoned any loyalty I’ve ever had to any one person or franchise, as proved by the fact that I didn’t go see TMNT in 2007. You’re only as good as whatever your most recent output is, and if it sucked, it’s going to be hard, if not impossible to win me back. Because fuck you, that’s why. This goes for actors, bands, and sixth seasons of television shows. There is one group, however, that can still earn those passes from me, and it’s a lot harder for me to take them away from them. The easiest people to give Lifetime Passes to – at least for me…and you, you just don’t know it yet — are directors. After watching Haywire, out today on Blu Ray and DVD, the one director, maybe even the one “entertainer”, who has the least revokable Lifetime Pass, is Steven Soderbergh.

 

 

There are directors working today with better track records, who have either made more good movies, or fewer bad ones. Darren Aronofsky has never made an Ocean’s sequel. Paul Thomas Anderson has never cast a porn star as his leading lady. But there’s something about an impending Soderbergh movie that gets me excited in weird ways, ways that typically only the Ninja Turtles and lesbian squirter porn are capable of. Haywire is by no means his best movie; it probably wouldn’t make his top ten. But it does confirm some of the reasons why I will always be a little excited for his movies: he’s an experimental filmmaker who loves genre exercises, but it’s never, at least intentionally, at the expense of our entertainment, something that most directors who do this kind of thing forget. We still want to want to watch your experiments.

 

 

Haywire stars Gina Carano, who used to beat the shit out of other women as an MMA fighter. On the surface, it’s an odd casting, seeing how she’s not super-famous and she can’t really act. This is a Soderbergh movie, though, so expect the unexpected, unless the unexpected is expected, and then expect the expected, unexpectedly. Carano plays Mallory Kane, a name that you can only get in the kind of movie that Haywire is supposed to be. Kane works for one of those companies that gets hired by the government to go into foreign cities to do fucked up, secret shit that the government isn’t supposed to be doing. One thing leads to another, single crosses get doubled, and Kane ends up on the run, trying not to get killed by the really mean people she used to work for. Trust no one, know how to punch, blah blah blah. We’ve seen it all before. And that’s exactly what Soderbergh is hoping for.

 

Michael Fassbender, star of Haywire, seeing Steven Soderbergh’s dick for the first time. It won’t be the last.

 

We’ve seen it all before, because we used to watch USA all day when we were kids. The plot I just described is shared by thousands of movies, all starring people who can’t really act. But none of them starred chicks who could beat the shit out of me, and certainly none of them were directed by Steven Soderbergh.

 

Let’s start with the casting of Carano, something that is going to be a make-or-break decision for a lot of viewers. Carano is kind of hot, and what she lacks in traditional beauty she makes up for in the fact that she can kick your ass. She’s kind of a bad actress, but what she lacks in traditional acting skill she makes up for in the fact that she can kick your ass. She did all of her own stunts (it’s really the least she could do), and that’s a huge thing. Cutaways that clearly replace Reese Witherspoon with her stunt double Dottie Moustache are distracting. Every fight in this movie is brutal, beginning with her first scene take down of Channing Tatum, something I’ve wanted to do since his sensitive masculinity in The Vow made my guyliner run all down my face. The fact that you know she could do that to Tatum in real life makes it that much more realistic. This is not to say that realism is the main goal of how these fights are shot or choreographed. They still have that B-movie “no amount of punches to the face can hurt me” aspect to them that we all have come to expect and love. The fact that it’s a little hard for Carano to deliver some exposition every once in a while becomes a small price to pay. Just do what I did, and pretend she’s drunk. And a little high. And maybe has Down’s Syndrome. It just makes the movie that much more interesting.

 

 

As far as Mr. Soderbergh goes, what he could bring to a movie like this and why he would do it in the first place, he kills it on all levels. When most directors do these genre experiments, even directors I really like like Tarantino, they spend most of the time injecting themselves into every aspect. They want you to know exactly what it would be like if said director directed said genre movie, and leave no questions asked. Soderbergh, however, really just wants to make one of these movies. His touch is here, sure. He’s not trying to recreate one of those movies, like he did with The Good German, and his camera moves in ways that are much more complicated than the movies of my youth. He also uses his different filter thingy, which is overused but helpful when the story starts to get complicated. But he’s not overly present here. He’s not constantly winking at the audience, telling everyone how cool it is that he’s making one of these movies. If you know some one that only likes these movies, and misses the days where Cynthia Rothrock was a superstar, give them this movie to watch. They might not love it, but I don’t think that they’re going to spend a ton of time comparing the decisions made here to those made in Solaris or Kafka. His touch is only evident if you’re looking for it, and I think that’s the perfect situation.

 

Soderbergh has another movie coming out this summer, which is a weird way to prove the fact that he’s retired, as he threatened a couple years ago. It’s called Magic Mike, and it stars Channing Tatum, and he plays a stripper, and I can’t wait. I’m not a huge male stripper fan, nor am I the biggest Channing Tatum fan (although I’m starting to turn into one, as clearly Soderbergh is demanding ). It’s the summer movie I’m most excited for that doesn’t involve superheroes or intense squirting action. In fact, I’ve even previously written about my excitement on this very site. It’s all because I have no idea what it will be like. It might be terrible. But if it is terrible, it will be terrible in an interesting way that will be fun to talk about. It’s shit like that that earns you a Lifetime Pass.

 

-Ryan “Ryan Haley” Haley