Haywire sets the bar for 2012

MANILA, Philippines - At one point, late in Steven Soderbergh’s globe-trotting thriller Haywire, two men plan a murder. One is the intended victim’s employer and the other a killer-for-hire with a dangerous past. The killer takes a sip of whiskey, hesitating. He admits he has never killed a woman before. The employer waves that off. “You shouldn’t think of her as being a woman. No, that would be a mistake.” That ominous warning works as a joke, but it also works as a real assessment of Haywire star Gina Carano, a mixed martial arts fighter the director saw on TV one night while idly channel surfing. As he said at the film’s L.A. premiere, “I saw Gina Carano beat up a woman in a cage, and I thought ‘The only way this could be better is if she were beating up a male movie star.’” He was smiling as he said it. You’ll be smiling as you watch.

Gina plays Mallory Kane, an ex-Marine-turned-private contractor in a world of lawyers, guns and money. She’s the superstar of her firm’s talent roster, a gung-ho go-getter and because she knows too much, she must be killed. We’re told all of this in flashback while Mallory flees for her life alongside a youth she reluctantly kidnapped, Scott (a fine and funnyMichael Angarano), as she drives his car through snowy upstate New York with promises to keep, miles to go before she sleeps and a bullet hole in her right arm.

Gina is a charming, vivacious young woman who can also throw and take a punch. The fight directors and stunt coordinators (including Jonathan Eusebio, Don Tai and J. J. Perry) have also gone to great lengths to teach co-stars like Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender and Channing Tatum how to do the same. When Mallory faces down a lover-turned-betrayer or a friend-turned-foe, we get to watch long-take, intimate fight scenes with no wires or digital trickery or off-looking stunt doubles. In an age when filmmaking has made fake fighting too fake, “Haywire”’s grunting, gut-bruising fight scenes hit like, well, one of Gina’s blows. As an actress, she’s in the same boat as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson: I wouldn’t want to watch either of them take one of the lead roles in Hamlet, but they’re easy to watch, physically magnetic and possessed of a grace in action that one cannot shop for, study or steal. (Indeed, weighed against a similar crew of athletics-to-acting peers, she’s a far superior screen presence than pro wrestler-actors Steve Austin or John Cena.)