Film Good But Underdeveloped
Steven Soderbergh is clearly a competent director, and he has a decent idea of how to put together an action movie. Haywire has some of the strongest action sequences I've seen in a while, and it avoids the shaky camera effects that have plagued many action movies such as the Bourne series. As the trope page notes, the action is crisp, necessarily brutal rather than gratuitously so, and Carano moves efficiently and swiftly. Carano is not the greatest actor to enter Hollywood, but I respect her effort because I view her as an MMA fighter first and foremost. This movie feels like a setup for a series of taut combat maneuvers that refreshingly avoid pretentious, excessively loud drama and pyrotechnics.
Unfortunately, Haywire feels underdeveloped. The story was poorly conceived and difficult to grasp. The dialogue is actually too cryptic and terse for its own good, but I understand that Soderbergh was aiming for spy-like exchanges that create an air of tension of mystery. I'm noticing a trend in action movies in which the demand for realism and not insulting the viewers' intelligence had led to directors to swing in the opposite direction. I feel that the "show don't tell" rule is being taken to extremes far too often, and Haywire is an example of what happens when the character development and plot development suffer from vague expository details.
On the plus side, I can't praise the action sequences enough. Carano and the other active cast members demonstrate proper room clearing and marksmanship, and Carano performs superbly in her use of plausible hand-to-hand combat techniques. When discussing ideas for writing structurally sound female action characters, I often point to Carano's portrayal of Mallory Kane as how it should be done. She has weight and muscle to her physique. She is very attractive and obviously a seasoned athlete. When she kicks, grapples and punches her foes, you can sense the gravity, effort and ferocity of each successful - and unsuccessful - blow. This is heavyweight, bone-crunching combat, not a dance recital. The gun fights, while difficult to discern, have a sense of immediacy that is closer to what an actual gun fight looks like. In short, Haywire has characters that look like they are sincerely trying to kill each other. Unfortunately, the storyline drags it down and hampers the pacing.
Film Just...not good at all.
It's a strange feeling you get leaving a movie theater. Sometimes you're elated, sometimes you think it was a decent enough way to sink 2 hours, sometimes you just say "meh." After Haywire, I left the theater feeling guilty that I'd given the makers of this movie 10 bucks.
The story is a decently enough set up, but the plot manages somehow to simultaneously be horribly convoluted and incredibly trite at the same time. Given the fact that it's supposed to be "gritty and realistic," its sheer contrived-ness is also rather mind-boggling. No self-respecting spy agency would put up this convoluted of a plot to try and get rid of somebody. The dialogue is horribly unnatural and feels canned and stilted, like a salted circus clown.
The biggest problem, though, was the acting and choreography. Gina Carano makes an admirable effort, but still manages to come up short, and as for the more experienced members of the cast, it's painfully obvious that they just don't give a shit. This acting is so wooden you'd be forgiven for mistaking some of the actors for trees. And as for the choreography...don't get me started. For a film that props up its "grittiness" and "realism," Mallory sure seems to spend a lot of time jumping off walls and doing acrobatic martial arts that would make a shonen protagonist jealous, as well as taking out whole squads of SWAT soldiers. In heels, no less. But that can be forgiven. No, the worst part of the choreography was the one-on-one fight scenes. They look like rehearsals by the worst actors for the world's worst school play. More than once, Mallory's opponents literally just stand there and wait to be punched in the face. There's no flow to the fighting, no real confrontation...it just looks like a skeleton practice for the first day on set. It couldn't have been more obvious if Ewan Mac Gregor had said out loud, "Now you punch me in the jaw!"
Antonio Banderas does look good in a beard, though.