Haywire
Directed By:
Steven Soderbergh
Written By: Lem
Dobbs
Starring: Gina
Carano, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, Michael Douglas,
Antonio Banderas, Michael Angarano, and Channing Tatum
Director of Photography: Peter Andrews (Soderbergh), Editor:
Steven Soderbergh, Production Designer: Howard Cummings, Original Music: David
Holmes
Rated: R for
ass-kicking, head-smashing violence.
The
pleasures in Haywire, of which are
there many, derive not from the dramatic reveals or explosions or kinetic,
impossible to follow, action sequences that populate most films that follow
spies and the work they do. Instead, the film gives us details through
cinematic delights: a tilted shot in a red-drenched palette, an abstract jazzy
score, and the sound of a gunshot runging out with booming thunder. This is
after all Steven Soderbergh, a director who despite being in the business for
over twenty years, has continued to remain experimental and metatextual with
each film, even when approaching genre exercises (most recently the virus
thriller Contaigon, which evolved
into a political statement on the age of Tea Party politics).
One
could argue Haywire is the closest
thing he’s done to a commercial film since his Ocean’s trilogy. However, Soderbergh plays against usual genre standards
so often that the film often feels much like Godard and Truffaut making a CIA
black ops ass kicking thriller than the next film from Michael Bay. Style is the substance of Haywire, which uses a somewhat paint-by-the-numbers script by Lem
Dobbs (who also wrote The Limey for
Mr. Soderbergh) as a starting point to give the almost deadening genre a new
classic, and led by the commanding performance of Gina Carano.
