Gina Carano must be pissed. A few years ago, she got herself fired from The Mandalorian and essentially bounced from Hollywood based on a stubborn inability to simply not tweet out whatever stupid, half-formed, potentially bigoted thought might be marinating in her brain. Had this happened in the last year or so, there’s a better-than-decent chance it would have gone ignored by Disney; maybe even, given all that’s going on, the online public at large. Transphobia and carelessly throwing around holocaust comparisons don’t seem to be nearly the fireable offenses they once were. But what’s done is done, and Carano has firmly positioned herself on the fringes of the industry. It’s too bad, because beyond her fun supporting work in The Mandalorian, Deadpool, and Fast & Furious 6, Carano starred in one of the best action movies of our young century with Haywire, which is currently streaming on Prime Video.
If you have a particular distaste for Carano, or celebrate her as a free-speech hero for opting into terrible movies for the rest of her life, Haywire gives you both everything and nothing. Her character Mallory Kane, a black-ops agent at a private firm, is so spare in both writing and performance that it’s easy enough to project whatever you want onto the placid determination of her exterior. Carano isn’t a great actor in the traditional sense, but Soderbergh clearly finds her fascinating; his job in the movie is to spread that feeling. He positions Mallory – who goes through a pretty traditional espionage-action movie arc of one last job, getting betrayed, and then going rogue to figure out who has it out for her and why – as an unstoppable force, and Carano obliges that image by performing her own stunts in the movie’s bruising fight scenes.
What’s especially strange and entertaining about Haywire is that for the most part, Carano isn’t fighting a series of other true challengers to her mixed-martial-arts rep. Mostly, she’s either taking on anonymous teams of grunts, or the extremely glamorous Hollywood stars Soderbergh surrounds her with. Logically, this should throw the movie off in a multiplicity of ways: Carano has to share scenes with performers who can, on a technical level, act her off the screen; those performers then have to do stunts opposite someone who can legitimately beat the holy hell out of them.
Instead of making the action weak and the acting weaker, however, Soderbergh’s gambit pays off. The more realistic fight choreography keeps the movie grounded in physical reality, a stark contrast to the superhero-influenced action of so much contemporary American cinema. And Carano’s laconic, near-affectless style works as a perfect counterpoint to the showier stars she ultimately leaves in her wake, whether it’s enthusiastically bro-ish Channing Tatum (who turns up immediately to receive a first-scene beatdown), slimy Ewan McGregor, or chilly, smooth operator Michael Fassbender. Fassbender features in perhaps the film’s best scene, a hotel-room brawl that’s like a gender-swapped, more hardcore version of a Bond movie (which is to say, more like From Russia with Love).
Fassbender has reteamed with Soderbergh for the new spy thriller Black Bag, a movie with a very different story and tone, more John le Carré than Jason Statham. But watching both (terrific) movies in close proximity also reveals a lot about Soderbergh’s approach to espionage films. He’s spent more time making crime pictures, which he increasingly interprets in economic terms, with capitalism functioning as the unseen rapacious mobster pulling the strings. There’s a bit of that in the corporate structure of Mallory’s employers in Haywire, and more than a bit in her willingness to sell her body (not exactly in sex, but as a force, and in the Fassbender sequence as “eye candy”) to make her way through the world. (Shades of Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, starring another chic-haircut brunette with limited traditional acting experience, albeit with way more punching.) But Soderbergh also uses spy movies to explore certain lifestyle choices, whether the strangely close yet clinical marriage of Black Bag or the resolutely isolated life that Mallory seems to lead in Haywire. The specifics of these globe-spanning operations never seem to matter as much as the psychology needed to navigate them.
To be clear, though, Haywire is still an action movie with chases and fights. (And seriously, Carano’s hair in it is top-notch.) Those accustomed to John Wick-level virtuosity may be disappointed by the relatively grounded and spare here – more scenes than set pieces – but Soderbergh stages them with such exacting clarity that you get on his minimalist wavelength. In pure entertainment value, this is one of his best movies. Carano’s subsequent behavior can’t take that away from him, or from herself.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.