Soderbergh's uncommon take on the common action spy movie.
My wife and I have a favorite restaurant where we live in Charlotte, N.C., a place called Zink. It’s one of those rare places where it’s useless for us to have a favorite item because we love the whole menu. We don’t just love their food; we love their approach to food. We know that if it’s on the menu it’s good because we’re at Zink and it’s on the menu. We don’t just go for a great steak; we go to find out how Zink makes a great steak.
Steven Soderbergh is one such movie director for me; he’s one of my cinematic Zinks. Whatever he does is going to look, sound and feel like his other work, and because I love his approach I can’t wait to see what happens when he tackles a new genre. As if the disaster movie Contagion, released a mere four months ago, was not enough to hold us through the year (and it was for me, although not as much for my fellow RELEVANT reviewer), fans of Café Soderbergh have yet another reason to rejoice. The film du jour is Haywire, and as Soderbergh’s first action film, it’s both a familiar and a fascinating new addition to the menu.
The first important thing to know about Haywire is that it is a lot of fun and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Haywire isn’t one of those passion projects that filmmakers dream about in film school; it’s more of a “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if …” project. Soderbergh has gone on record saying that his inspiration for this movie was nothing more complicated than seeing Gina Carano (the mixed martial artist who plays Haywire’s main character) fight on TV and then deciding that she would make an interesting lead for a ’60s-style spy movie. Really, the proceedings don’t get much more weighty than that initial idea, and everyone involved in the film’s making seems first and foremost to enjoy themselves. Like the cast of Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven movies, the supporting actors don’t try to disappear into any of their roles; they wear their characters like costumes. It’s fun to watch A-list actors play against their own personas. Handsome Antonio Banderas gets a scruffy beard, sensitive Ewan MacGregor gets a weird military haircut, severe Michael Douglas is nice and tough-guys Channing Tatum and Michael Fassbender get their butts kicked by a girl. Good times.
The second important thing to know about Haywire is that it is completely a Steven Soderbergh movie. To be sure, Haywire is not the crowning achievement of our prolific director’s work, nor is it meant to be. Haywire is a stylistic highlight reel, an experiment to see how elements from previous Soderbergh movies would work when combined with the now thoroughly familiar genre of “globe-trotting action movie.” It might be fun to watch the Mission: Impossible movies, the Jason Bourne movies and Haywire back to back. On paper, these secret-agent-on-the-run movies have a lot in common, but one of these things is definitely not like the others.
In fact, the real joy of this movie is seeing how differently many shop-worn action movie norms look when they are filtered through Soderbergh’s conventions, the things he routinely employs in so many of his films. Composer David Holmes’ music sounds a whole lot like his work for the Ocean's movies, but the result is new when the jazzy grooves are placed over a hostage extraction. Soderbergh acts as his own director of photography, and the stripped-down look of the film matches much of what he has done previously. This might be a drawback if I’d ever seen a hotel room fight scene lit only by table lamps, but I hadn’t. Even the onscreen font used to identify various cities looks similar to the one used in Soderbergh’s indie films Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience, but still stranger and cooler when placed over Haywire’s exotic locales.
The soul of Haywire is in its fight scenes, and it’s here that Soderbergh brings the most specificity. The Bourne movies have groomed us to expect shaky camerawork and a bajillion edits every time things get rough, but Haywire completely bucks that trend. Instead, Gina Carano’s many altercations are presented with minimal camera movement and editing, and often without music. Point-blank brutality meets art-house filmmaking, and the results are consistently striking. The fights seem less like frantic flailing than exhausting physical contests. There’s no crazy wirework or gravity-defying trickery. Everything seems grounded and possible. The no-frills approach is visceral, mesmerizing and kind of refreshing.
All this praise may make Haywire sound like a near masterpiece—it’s not. It would be silly to weigh this movie down with a term like that. By filling Haywire with ingredients from his previous films, from gourmet epics like Contagion to lighter soufflés like Ocean’s Eleven, Steven Soderbergh has given us in Haywire his version of a burger and fries: a common movie made with uncommon style.
Dan Cava is an independent filmmaker and the co-host of Moviemakers podcast, available soon on iTunes. Dan's directorial work can be seen at vimeo.com/dancava. He writes film reviews for RELEVANT magazine.
