After suffering through Steven Soderbergh’s painfully dull Dublin-based action flick, I can offer only one explanation as to how Haywire came about: someone in Fáilte Ireland has photos of Soderbergh with a large tub of Vaseline and a goat.
At least, I hope so, because if Soderbergh is genuinely proud of this embarrassing, awfully scripted, unengaging mess that’s less like Out Of Sight and more like a violent episode of Fair City with the soundtrack of a ‘70s Charlie’s Angels-themed porno, the once-celebrated master of classy crime capers clearly needs to be euthanised immediately.
Much like Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, which cast porn star Sasha Grey in a role that played to her strengths, Haywire doesn’t see the director stretching his leading lady too much. Former MMA star Gina Carano’s role as a ballsy covert operative forced to go rogue not only plays up her Angelina-Lite beauty but allows her to peacock her indisputably impressive fighting skills. Unfortunately, also like The Girlfriend Experience, Haywire reeks of apathy, awkwardness and amateur acting, and a director who finally seems to have abandoned even the pretence of substance over a very questionable style.
Though Hollywood needs a new action heroine, Carano’s elementary acting skills just aren’t up to the task, and when not grappling with enemy operatives, she seems desperately uncomfortable. To be fair, she’s not helped by the horribly clichéd script which forces her to utter incredibly enlightening statements like, “I don’t wear the dress,” in case her half-hour long pulverisation of (a wasted) Michael Fassbender in a Shelbourne suite left you thinking she was a wallflower.
This could be overlooked if Carano’s fight scenes were genuinely entertaining, but even they bypass indulgent and head straight for Team America-vomiting-sequence territory, as the sheer length and repetition of each wall-running, neck-breaking fight becomes tragically comic.
And the awkwardly shot Dublin looks grey and drab too, so it’s not even a decent ad! Fáilte Ireland, release those pics.