Boy was this a disaster. Looking up things like “Best Spy Movies”, “Best Espionage Movies”, or “Best Action Movies” will frequently turn this movie up as an example of a well crafted film filled with some of the best work its lauded director (Steven Soderbergh) has put together and with a female lead in Gina Carano, it shows that women can do action movies too!
Ugh…While I have liked some of his work a great deal (Out of Sight, Traffic) other works of his are merely fluff or intensely boring (The Good German, Oceans 12, Oceans 13). Haywire is as bad as a modern movie gets. Soderbergh has always liked to play with how he films a movie and is enamored of the “cool” people in Hollywood (and they of him). This runs poorly in both instances here.
First is the look of the film itself which appears to have been shot on an 1994 Nokia flip phone. My goodness. Watching this film is painful on the eyes. The colors are horribly muted and dull. Maybe this was supposed to make the film like some 1960’s Bond film?? I don’t know but it doesn’t work. Details are lost, scenes in foreign countries look like my backyard and scenes that should be crisp and defined (shooting in upstate NY in Winter with snow) become a mush of indistinguishable features. Oh, and don’t get me started on the sound in the film…at times there simply is none. A car trying to make a getaway in reverse doing high speed driving? Completely silent on the car interior to the extent it was actually jarring. Off kilter sound is present a number of times and it seems like they used that 1994 Nokia for recording sound as well as video.
Then we get to the acting and actors. Oh, there are numerous big name actors here, many of which have worked with Soderbergh in the past—Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, and Michael Fassbender. And there is Gina Carano who at the time was in the middle of an intended transition from MMA start to actress. This one film seemed to put a stop to that until she get her high profile role on the Mandalorian where she was cast far better in the role of a gruff, robot like, bounty hunter in a sci-fi/fantasy show where acting is not overly important. In Haywire though? She is expected to carry the film and she doesn’t. Her MMA skills certainly don’t carry over in any significant extent and she comes across well, robotic, icy, and clunky. Watching her run is, like the visuals, painful. Nothing she does on screen appears natural…its all forced.
The story itself does no one any justice either…whoppee…its supposed to be some sort of double crossing of Carano’s character by the government and the spy firm who hires her to do the government’s dirty work…Yawn..
This is one where my wife and I turned to each other after watching it asking each other why on earth we allowed it to drag through to its conclusion and waste an hour and a half of our lives. Don’t let it waste yours.