Soderbergh strips a spy thriller down to a woman, a string of rooms and the men who underestimate her. The fights are hard, plain and superbly staged; the story between them is cool to the point of indifference, and so, at times, is its star.
Steven Soderbergh has made a spy thriller by taking things out of one. Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) does the work governments would rather not sign for, and when we meet her she is in a diner in upstate New York, being asked to come quietly by a colleague, Aaron (Channing Tatum). She declines. She leaves with a young man called Scott (Michael Angarano) and tells him, as he drives, how it came to this: a hostage job in Barcelona, a second job in Dublin, and somewhere between the two a decision made about her by other people. Lem Dobbs’s script gives her little else and the film runs 93 minutes.
Soderbergh shoots and edits it himself, and the fights are where the decisions show. He keeps the camera at a middle distance and lets the shot run, so we can see it is Carano doing this and that the man is, most of the time, losing. There is no music under any of it. David Holmes’s score, loping bass and brushed drums that sound lifted from a spy record of 1971, plays over the travelling and the talk and stops dead at the first blow, and what we hear instead is breath and furniture. The best of it is in a Dublin hotel room with Paul (Michael Fassbender), a fellow operative posing as her husband. Neither says a word. We winced, aloud, at the sound a head makes against a wall in a room with no music.
Each city gets its own light. Barcelona is amber and hot, Dublin grey-green and wet, the New York of the framing story bleached white with snow. Howard Cummings gives Dublin a hotel of pale marble and long corridors that Mallory will need to get out of. When she runs across the rooftops Soderbergh hangs back on a long lens, so she is a small dark shape against slate. Shoshana Rubin puts her in a cocktail dress for the Dublin evening and then makes her fight in it, and the film is dry enough not to remark on this.
Around Carano stand an unusual number of famous men, and the joke of the casting is that they are furniture. Ewan McGregor’s Kenneth, who runs the firm and used to share her bed, has the tight charm of a man who has already decided you are a cost. Michael Douglas’s Coblenz folds his arms and represents the government. Antonio Banderas’s Rodrigo wears a beard and says nothing to be trusted. Bill Paxton, as her father John, supplies the film’s only warmth in two brief scenes, and it is enough.
Then there is Carano, a mixed martial artist rather than an actor. Some critics have said she cannot act, and we think that mis-describes what the film wants from her. She moves like someone who has been hit before and is not afraid of it, which no amount of training gives a performer, and she looks at men the way a mechanic looks at an engine. Her line readings are flat, as if she were saying the words for the second time. Soderbergh knows it, gives her little to say, and does the acting with the camera when she needs to be angry or afraid.
The trouble is everything between the fights. The scenes in which Kenneth and Coblenz and Rodrigo work out who has sold whom are cool, brief and hard to care about, and the frame in Scott’s car is a device; Angarano is likeable and has nowhere to go. Around the hour mark there is a run of men in good coats saying names in offices, and we noticed we were waiting for the next fight rather than attending to the man on screen. We were not bored. We simply did not much care who had sold her, and the film does not seem to mind.
Soderbergh has done this sort of thing with more feeling. Out of Sight (1998), also scored by Holmes, and The Limey (1999), also written by Dobbs, had people in them we minded about as well as shots we admired. Haywire has one person, and she is mostly kicking. See it for her and for the hotel room, and at 93 minutes it is over before the coolness starts to grate. It carries a 15, and the sound of that hotel room is most of the reason.
