Haywire

Deadly Is the Female. Soderbergh approached the cohabitation of a man and woman in an absolutely logical way – as an action thriller. The film’s leitmotif is the necessity of overcoming the collapse of one’s first serious relationship. Meanwhile, the female protagonist tries marriage, seen by both participants from the beginning as a game full of pretence and rather abruptly ended after the wedding night, which has the nature of a life-and-death struggle. The only man she can depend on is her father, whose brains she wants to blow out and from whom Mallory herself keeps no secrets. So, she finds certainty only in returning home, not in a fake relationship with one of her “tried and tested” partners, whom she doesn’t even know properly. ___ Unlike in “patriarchal” spy thrillers (e.g. Bond movies), the woman here is not a negative character, but actually the only positive one. She doesn’t gain men’s respect with her charm and intellect, but with her physical dominance. Though she uses her body as she would to erotically entice a man (to act as a mere decoy is beneath her level), she does so in a more energetic way. Thanks to the raw content of the elegantly filmed fight scenes (unlike Bourne-style shaky-cam filming), the feeling of physical contact is far more intense than in action movies depending exclusively on sharp editing. ___ Watching the protagonist’s body in motion is doubly pleasurable for male viewers, as her repeated displays of control over the situation (rather than the camera’s control over her body) mitigates the feeling of voyeuristic guilt. Here, a beautiful woman does not appear as an object of leering gazes, but as a goal- and action-oriented person who takes greater initiative even in the matter of sex. ___ During the first two-thirds of the film, Mallory’s dominance over the image is further multiplied by the fact that this involves the retelling of previous events through her flashbacks. We are provocatively and repeatedly made aware that she is steering her narrative to a particular character who is basically unimportant for the story. Our “eye”, represented by the camera in the diegesis, is not even allowed into the car in which the protagonist summarises her history. (This lends itself also to the interpretation that the terrified young man represents the typical action-movie viewer, whom Soderbergh is somewhat making fun of – that’s why, for example, Mallory constantly repeats important names, just as crucial information is repeated in Hollywood action flicks.) ___ The revealing of moments when Haywire uses the stripped-down action plot for the purpose of supra-genre commentary does not comprise the film’s essence, but its value added. At its core, it is a brisk, though dramaturgically loose female variation on Bourne movies, or rather (given the B-movie subject matter) Commando, in which an emerging action star crushes his (for the moment) more famous acting colleagues between his thighs on various continents and nothing can stop us from savouring the action in and of itself. Chuck Norris may know how to divide by zero and Bond’s double-o gives him a license to kill, but Gina Carano would nullify both of them before they could utter the word “shit”. 80% (02/03/2012) (less) (more)