Haywire

PREVIOUSLY: SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN

In this action film from 2011, Mallory (Gina Carano) is a black ops contractor who is betrayed by her employer (Ewan McGregor.) She sets out to unravel the conspiracy of why she was set up, so she can beat the traitors to the payback punch.

Hey, did you know that Gina Carano and Ewan McGregor once played exes trying to kill each other a solid decade before they were both involved with Disney’s Star Wars, before Gina went fully off the alt-right deep end? I didn’t! And my life is no richer for knowing it now.

Before I get into anything else, this is one of those films that only shows the title at the end. It has such a generic title anyway that was clearly decided on during post-production, and as the movie starts, it just kinda feels like you’re watching a movie without a name? I needed it to slam me headfirst into the title if it wanted me to remember it. I had to keep looking this movie up as I was writing and organizing my notes. I usually do that at some point to make sure I got all the details right, but I had to do it constantly with this one because the fucking title will not stick in my brain. Haywire. It’s Haywire. Let’s see if you remember it at the end of this review without having to scroll back up.

I thought about doing a full plot summary, but I’m not sure if that’s necessary. I did have to write it all out anyway because the framing and timeline of this movie are so needlessly confusing.

It begins in media res, with Gina Carano meeting Channing Tatum (I have already forgotten all the character names I caught while watching the movie so I’m not going to bother with them) in a diner. They have a conversation referring to a job that went bad. Gina thought she was meeting Ewan McGregor here, but Ewan sent Channing to bring Gina to him instead. Gina refuses to go with him. They fight. Gina wins. She takes another diner patron, Michael Angarano, hostage and carjacks him. He takes this very well. He is extremely cool with getting carjacked. Gina doesn’t bother asking him how his day is going, or how the course of his life led him to this particular diner on this fateful day. She just launches right into, “Yep, that’s me. I bet you’re wondering how I got into this situation” and the movie flashes back. But it also keeps flashing forward to her telling the story in the car to a bizarrely chill rando before flashing back again, and it does that at least a few times before Gina in the car skips over an uneventful travel montage that doesn’t really matter to, “And then I got screwed over again in the diner, and then I carjacked you and started telling you my life story for murky reasons that are never made super clear and don’t really end up mattering anyway, and that brings us up to now.” And then the last third of the movie plays out in real time.

Oh, I hated this movie’s structure. When they’re done well, framing devices cutting in and out can be extremely effective. Some of my favorite movies have them. The Princess Bride, Arrival, Moulin Rouge!. Citizen Kane. This movie is not Citizen Kane.

If an action movie is focused on just being an action movie–no romance, no drama, nothing else to cling to–just pure action set pieces for the audience to goggle at, my brain tends to turn itself off. I don’t know why it does this. I know, logically, that fight scenes are as heavily choreographed and practiced as dance scenes, and I love dance scenes. I love dance/fight combo scenes. The opening of the original West Side Story is one of my favorite scenes of all time. But just fighting? The second verisimilitudinous punches start flying, my eyes roll all the way back in my head by themselves because I just have a hard time appreciating most action movies unless there’s some emotional anchor that I have to cling to. I have to care about at least one of the characters fighting with people. It’s an absolute necessity for me. That’s the only way I can make it through an action movie without struggling not to dissociate from boredom. I cannot gel with movies that just go, “Look at these attractive people run fast, drive fast cars, and hit each other real hard. You’re welcome.” I’m already asleep.

So this is probably a me problem, but the structure of this movie did not help me out at all. Gina’s already in a jam with a character we don’t know yet. She and Channing Tatum talk vaguely about a job gone wrong. The conversation gets tense but seems to be calming down again when Channing just throws a mug of hot coffee in her face and the fight is on. I have no emotional tether yet. I don’t even know what’s going on. Maybe, like Michael Angarano, we’re supposed to immediately feel defensive of Gina because she’s a lady and Channing Tatum is a large man who attacked her unprovoked.

The only problem with that is–aside from the fact that she was most famous for being an MMA fighter and not a regular defenseless random woman at the time of the movie’s release–is that I watched this for the first time in 2024. Now, I don’t advocate violence against anybody. But I’d be lying if I said Channing Tatum throwing hot coffee in transphobe/election-denier/antivaxxer/Holocaust-trivializer Gina Carano’s face out of fucking nowhere was not at least a little bit unintentionally funny. It was just a teeny tiny bit cathartic whenever someone got a good swing on her. I know it’s just pretend and everyone was fine, so I don’t think there’s any harm in me finding this mildly amusing. When the actress I’m supposed to be rooting for against all odds is in real life filing a lawsuit funded by Elon Musk against Disney for rightfully firing her for spewing her egregiously hateful views, any instinctive “Oh no, a fellow woman in danger!” reaction I might have had has been pretty thoroughly dampened.

And then it goes from that to launching us back to how this all started, and I just could not care less. I don’t care about Gina, I barely care about this dumb kid who’s fine with letting the strange woman who snapped Channing Tatum’s arm in half borrow his car with him inside it. There’s no emotional development or clarity or recontextualization to be had here. It only muddies the waters further by presenting what should be a relatively simple story completely out of order, and in the end, even after all my diagramming, I’m still not sure if I fully understood the sequence of events.

So anyway, long story short, this is an action movie, where people hit each other a lot and I have no one to root for, and two-thirds of it are being told out of order to someone else after the fact. Oh no, my attention span.

The dialogue was pretty bad. Ewan refers to someone at one point as a “curious character.” People don’t talk like that. No one felt like they were having a real conversation in between all the fighting. Just brutally utilitarian plot delivery. “I am going to go to [LOCATION] to meet [CHARACTER] and try to determine [FACT]. I will see you at [SECOND LOCATION] at some later date.”

This is also not helped by the way Gina Carano talks. Her delivery wasn’t flat, exactly, but she did say every line in exactly the same way. The cadence and emphasis was the same every single time, no matter what she was saying. It was weird. It did nothing to aid me in fighting like the devil to keep from gently nodding off.

There’s some really egregiously obvious ADR with her, too. There’s one scene in the trailer that’s in the finished movie. In the car, she says in response to Michael Angarano, “Oh, yeah.” The volume on that is much louder than any of the rest of the dialogue in the scene, and it doesn’t match her lip movement at all. I think that was the most noticeable one–right at the start of the movie, too–but it did pop up again here and there. Were they trying to fix the delivery? It didn’t work.

I don’t think I cared for the sparse soundtrack, either. I know only diegetic sounds are supposed to make fight scenes feel more realistic and visceral. I just don’t think it usually works for me. Again, I need something. I need to already be on the edge of my seat. It just didn’t feel very intentional, the way they did it. It kinda seemed like the score didn’t get all the way done in time so they had to go without in some scenes.

And I have a bone to pick with the editing. All of the scenes but especially the fight scenes are cut so rapidly. Yes, I know, that’s how action scenes are almost always cut. I know it’s supposed to go at a fast pace. But this movie also cuts back and forth from so many different random angles for seemingly no reason. And I’m sure this was intended to get us as many views of the fight choreography as possible. But it made it harder for me to keep track of the action because the editor kept flinging me to the opposite side of the room I was just on and everything is flipped now, and before I can even process it I’m launched back to the spot I was before and everything’s flipped back the first way, but then I’m smashed into another closer shot from a third or fourth completely new angle and I have to figure out where everyone is in relation to each other again, and then back and forth between maybe five or more shots total in extremely rapid succession until the scene finally ends. Mostly it just made me disoriented and kind of dizzy, which was a less welcome change from confused and bored than you might expect.

I do have one single nice thing to say about this movie. It doesn’t really matter to the plot at all, and would have made no difference if it was cut, but it’s mentioned a few times that Gina and Ewan’s characters were in a relationship for about a year but broke up six months ago. Late in the movie, Gina has gone to her dad’s–Bill Paxton’s–house to set a trap for Ewan, Channing, and their other guys. For some reason, Ewan is extremely confident that Gina did not get there before them. And he also does not ever consider simply taking Bill Paxton hostage at any point, even when it becomes apparent that Gina is already there and has started playing Alien in the vents with his men. For a double-crossing black ops mercenary, he sure does seem kinda stupid.

But anyway, the nice thing: Ewan shows up at Bill Paxton’s house pretending to be someone he’s not, because whether or not Gina has told him the whole “he tried to get me killed” part, he’s sure Gina has told him at some point she works for and/or has dated a guy named “Kenneth.” He asks Bill Paxton, point-blank, if she’s ever mentioned anyone named Kenneth before. Bill Paxton says no. Ewan (as Kenneth) seems genuinely taken aback. He says, “He was her boss and they were in a relationship for over a year, and she never said anything about him to you?” He seems almost hurt that his ex-girlfriend never even mentioned him to her father in passing, even though he’s here to try to kill her himself this time for reasons. It was the one humanizing, flash of genuine emotion that I could cling to like driftwood from a sinking ship. Thanks as always for showing up today, Ewan. Sorry she left you to drown on the beach from Grease with your grotesquely broken leg trapped between two rocks as the tide was coming in.

Review over. Can you remember the name of this movie? Me neither.

COMING UP NEXT: THE IMPOSSIBLE