Faethor Ferenczy’s review published on Letterboxd:
Haywire was an action thriller from the highly regarded Steven Soderbergh back in 2011. It had quite an impressive cast including Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, Michael Douglas, and Antonio Banderas. It also starred Gina Carano in the lead role, who was a successful Mixed Martial Artist and this film gives her a vehicle to showcase some her impressive fighting techniques, and potentially jump-start her acting career as a female action star.
Carano plays Mallory Kane, a freelance covert operative, who - as part of her firm - is hired to rescue a hostage in Spain. This appears to go according to plan, the mission ends and the hostage is rescued. Mallory is then sent on another mission to Dublin where she has to pose as the wife of an MI6 agent but this turns out to be part of a plan to assassinate her. She escapes and has to spend the rest of the film on the run, using her skills to evade various pursuers as part of an international manhunt. She also needs to attempt to make it back to the USA in order to protect her father and hopefully unravel the conspiracy against her so that she can clear her name and exact revenge on those that double crossed her.
Given the names of the director and the cast, then I think it's fair to say that the film didn't really live up to very high expectations. This in no way means it's a bad film though. It was very stylishly made with some very creative camera angles and a great and almost relentless Jazz score (which a lot of people seemed to hate). There's a lot of tension generated throughout the film as she is constantly evading capture, and I think the film does a good job at portraying the paranoia and constantly alert state that Mallory is in as she is always on the lookout for enemies. The cinematography is very good along with the editing, and the whole film has a very stylized and slick feel to it.
The fight scenes throughout are amazing to watch and extremely realistic with the highlight being the fight in Mallorys room between her and Michael Fassbenders character. Very brutal! I have to admit, I'm never really watched MMA fights on TV and so don't really know how these compare in terms of technique, but it was impressive all the same and seemed excellently choreographed. It was easy to believe that people were genuinely being hurt here.
Where the film does suffer is in the script. It's a very generic double-crossed revenge theme that's been done a thousand times before and is something you wouldn't expect from a Soderbergh movie. Attempts did seem to have been made to create more complexities within the plot but this just made it confusing at times with some events not being explained very well, and others seeming illogical. Also, as great as she was in the fighting department, Caranos acting abilities aren't really all that great which is a problem when she's pretty much carrying the film, and the more accomplished names ended up as no more than extended cameos. And finally - I felt that there was no real character development and the various characters throughout the film felt quite superficial due to not being properly fleshed out.
But... despite this, I did really enjoy watching it and it definitely had enough strong points for me to give it a score of 7/10