“Haywire”
That seems to be largely because its star is MMA all-star Gina Carano, who does her own stunts, and who is under the sort of scrutiny most male action stars never see. (Among some bizarre pearl-clutching about her fight scenes, her acting ability has been repeatedly questioned, which is strange, because I do not remember a lot of interviews asking Jean-Claude Van Damme how his workshops with Meryl Streep are going.)
We live in a world that makes it impossible to leave discourse at the door about this kind of thing, and means that the movie hits theatres under a lot of baggage it doesn’t deserve. But Haywire itself seems to be blithely unconcerned about it all. Instead, it focuses on turning in a slick action movie that can be boiled down to Vasquez: The Motion Picture, and is exactly as fun as that sounds.
Example: in the film’s opening moments, Carano’s Mallory Kane sits at a diner in upstate New York, waiting for someone. The man who shows, Aaron (Channing Tatum, bless his heart), is not the one she wanted to see, and when she refuses to leave with him, he sighs, orders a cup of coffee – and attacks her. The fight that follows is swift and brutal, with a brief intervention by a college-kid bystander; when Mallory inevitably gets the upper hand, she singles the kid out as her getaway, and the two of them take off in his car while she explains how she got where she is.
The scene, like the movie as a whole, is solid. The cast, including Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, and Ewan McGregor as Indeterminate Accent Man, is clearly having fun. The plot, though it has the requisite double-crosses, is uncomplicated (she’s awesome, she’s set up, she busts out, she tracks down everyone responsible and beats the snot out of them). The script maintains tension while being just light enough that no one ever delivers a tearful speech about the perils of private security contracting in a politically wheeler-dealer world run mad. It’s a wise choice for the untested Carano, though she’s a capable enough actress – she has presence and timing, and while I wouldn’t pay to see her as Lady Macbeth, I enjoyed watching her as an action hero far more than I have enjoyed other actress’s recent attempts at it.
And yes, part of that is because when she’s fighting, it looks sharp, smooth, natural. The fight scenes are hardly ever scored, and often brutal. (The audience responses tended to be a moment of excitement that a fight was coming, followed by a long and increasingly tense silence broken by audible wincing as the fight progressed, and then a release of nervous laughter at scene’s end, which seems notable in an audience likely saturated with action-movie imagery.) One vaguely Bourne-y sequence follows her as she hightails it through Dublin, avoiding the enemy and tangling with the police, and includes her jumping between buildings at considerable height; however, the move doesn’t stand out as a stunt, but rather as a point of tension in a long and palpably exhausting escape attempt. (The camera often follows her claustrophobically as she has to backtrack through escape routes, shimmy down close quarters, and track enemies under pressure. It’s effective; if we could convince Soderbergh to drop the canary-yellow flashback filter and surreal piano interludes, we’d be in good shape.)
But beneath this standard spy story is a quietly subversive main character. Mallory Kane exists in a sphere in which she’s allowed to bypass the usual narratives offered to women who tote action movies on their shoulders. She never has to prove herself against the odds; she’s the best there is, a point no one on her team – or up against her – ever disputes. She doesn’t have to overcome a backstory of victimization; the movie suggests she became a Marine because why wouldn’t you, if you were as dedicated and as calm under pressure as she is? She isn’t vilified for sexuality; casual hookups happen but don’t hamper. She’s not overly sexualized, despite one formalwear fight scene that had the potential to turn into a James Bond set piece and wisely steered away. She doesn’t have to scrabble out from abusive circumstances or punishing family losses; her dad is adoring and capable of handling himself. And she doesn’t suffer from unnecessary machismo off the field of play; while on the run with Frame Story McGee, she strikes up a capable and friendly rapport, smoothly checking in at intervals to make sure he’s following the story that she knows he’ll end up telling the cops.
Though we’re still at a point where a leading woman in a movie tacitly stands for All Women in Movies, it’s still odd that a character who is white, fit, and conventionally attractive can still deviate so much from what Hollywood has made its norm. But she does, and this movie serves both as an action flick with a convincing female lead, and as an under-the-radar glimpse of a possible Hollywood, one that makes the assumption that a female character can be worth watching simply because she’s kind of awesome.
And it’s a good assumption; I’ll be seeing this again.
