Total Domestic Gross: $8,425,370

Unfortunately, Haywire doesn’t live up to the name.  The movie rolls on and on with a one-dimensional, fragmented script and, consequently, the story never gets meaty enough.  Soderbergh expounded in an interview to boxoffice.com that athletes have a unique and difficult to reproduce way of carrying themselves, and that “He could watch Gina Carano run for an hour.”  I, however, could not and I’m almost sure audiences have already by the second leg of the first foot chase grown exceedingly tired of watching just as much. I asked myself, “Ok, when does the action get exciting?”  The answer unfortunately is never. 

Mallory Kane, played by Gina Carano, is hired out by global entities to carry out jobs, which governments cannot openly authorize or talk about.  She is sent to rescue a hostage in Barcelona, only to find out after that she must now travel to Dublin.  Once in Dublin, things go awry and she discovers she’s been double-crossed by her own bosses.   The movie surrounds her escape from Dublin and search for revenge.

If the action were amazing in this movie, I might be more forgiving.  However, I’m exasperated after watching Carano chase a not so villainous man down the streets of Barcelona for what seems like forever, and without the beautiful shots of Barcelona that we want to see.  All we are getting is running, and Carano’s face never changes. The fight scene at the end still doesn’t make up for it, because by that time we’re expecting much more than a short, flat, and anticlimactic punch and jab sequence.

The movie nose-dives in too many areas to make it good, including one major concept, relationship development.  Unfortunately, throughout the entire movie, most of the character relationships are left completely to the imagination.  The assumption of many movie-makers that action can take the place of character development and/or swift and savvy scripts is a travesty, and robs us of a complete movie package.  The relationships such as father and daughter, lover and lover, betrayer and betrayed, are just not touched upon, much less developed.  In the movie, Gina and Ewan are supposed to have had a relationship in the past, but we don’t see any real traces of previously shared intimacy.  I wanted to see the love between Channing and Gina develop more and have the opportunity to grow with them. Along with Ewan mentioning to Gina’s father about her one-year love affair with Tatum, we are only allowed a short kissing scene, one fight scene, and that’s about it. Due to this fact alone, we aren’t invested as much as anticipated, especially during Tatum’s last scene.

Character development is lacking as well.  We know Carano can kick, punch, and kill like nobody’s business, but it’s just not enough to show who she is as a person.  We just don’t see enough inner-conflict or human experience, and in the end don’t know much more about her than we did to begin with.  Michael Douglass however, even though he appears on-screen in snip-its, delivers a breath of fresh air, finesse, and his usual multidimensional acting, which keeps the movie going, and gives us a break from the overall blandness of the entire film.

Overall, the film isn’t that ingenious.  It’s slightly exasperating, and anti-climactic with lack-luster verbal exchanges, and though watching Gina Carano display her MMA skills on the big screen is impressive, I’d be much happier watching her live, in the ring.