There are a lot of movies out right now that I want to see, so I've decided to take in a week of early-afternoon showings, thanks to a decent-sized cinema a short walk from the library where I'm currently doing some research.
If all goes to plan, I'll be watching (and reviewing) the Kate Beckinsale vampire sequel Underworld: Awakening, the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes pastiche Game of Shadows, Ralph Fiennes' Shakespeare adaptation Coriolanus, and just possibly Spielberg's War Horse - though not, sadly, the new George Lucas film Red Tails, which is having trouble finding a distributor. Apparently, the studios can't work out how to market a straightforward war film starring actors who co-starred in Jerry Maguire and Iron Man (hint: it's a straightforward war film, like Captain America or War Horse; is the studios' problem even worth dignifying with an explanation?).
Anyway, largely because it starts a little later than the other afternoon shows and I could push up the hill to catch it in time today, I began with Haywire... which I wanted to see largely on the basis of a kick-ass trailer showcasing a quality cast.
A woman walks into a snow-girt roadside diner in upstate New York; she's met by a guy with a gun under his puffer jacket who looks a little like Brad Pitt; when he attempts to get her to come not-so-quietly, she leaves him broken on the floor, and carjacks a hapless small-town geek who looks a little like Shia LaBeouf; as they speed away, she begins to explain the reason she's on the run.
It's a complicated explanation; the woman, endowed with the hard-boiled name Mallory Kane, is an ex-Marine working as a security "contractor" for various employers; her story involves a lot of A-list Holywood talent: her boss and ex-boyfriend Kenneth (Ewan McGregor), U.S. government intelligence hierarch Koblenz (Michael Douglas), his Spanish counterpart Rodriguez (Antonio Banderas), and Anglo-Irish hitman Paul (Michael Fassbender). For the next two hours, we follow her recounting her betrayal, escaping her pursuers, and getting revenge on the people who sold her out.
Overall, this film has a lot going for it, but there are two comments that need to qualify that statement: firstly, it's not the frenetically-paced rally of fast-cut action and sharp twists that the trailer would suggest - it's something altogether more classy and considered; but at the same time, it's let down a little for me by a slightly flat third act and an abrupt climax.
Mallory Kane is played by a female martial-arts champion named Gina Carano, who I'd never heard of before the trailer; I'm not sure she's ever going to play a Shakespeare villainess, but she's used with very good effect in this movie, being required to fight, move, make professional preparations for her next mission, and engage in the sort of shallow small-talk that everyone involved knows is fake. In one of the best of many good scenes, she winds down between hits with a glass of red wine and some cleaning of her pistols.
Carano's casting suits the mood of the film, with its unblinking lens taking in a cynical, commercialized world where everything is for sale and taking a life costs nothing, all concealed under the outward veneer of fashionable consumerism and professional business-speak. When Mallory and Paul are impersonating a couple, their thoroughly professional interaction echoes the familiar rhythms of a "successful" relationship, right down to the unromantic physicality of the fight that follows their evening out. Even the title is a meaningless piece of branding, chosen purely for marketing purposes.
But, on the other hand, Mallory's motivation for turning on her bosses isn't outrage or emotional angst - it's that old-fashioned, unfashionable sense of patriotism and duty that you'd expect of a U.S. Marine, allied perhaps to some finely-honed kill-or-be-killed instincts. She could be John Wayne's daughter. Not that this film would do anything so crude as to make any of that explicit. It's left to sneak up on you as you think it through.
This isn't a particularly deep film, but it's a well-realized and superior action movie, one that takes its own limitations and does something interesting and satisfying with them.
That ability to make things interesting extends to the camerawork. There's some very nice use of colour and tone and composition - yellow highlights in an apartment decorated in muted monochrome, or the way that the fugitive heroine's leather jacket and grey knit hat become camouflage against the urban roofscape of red brick and vent ducting. These stylized visuals are used to define a sense of place, with shifts between them marking the passage of time, and thus they give visual structure to the narrative - contrasting with another aspect of the cinematography, the way the screen frames printed words, architectural space and human movement to develop a silent subtext about sexuality, violence, internationalization and consumerism.
This is also a film that isn't afraid to use long cuts, especially for the fight sequences. One thing that didn't work so well was the intrusive, insistent music, which I suspected was imposed by the studio to jazz up a film they didn't quite understand, but which turns out to be from the director's regular collaborator - so it must be designed to lay a deliberate dissonance over the well-composed visuals.
I was surprised, after writing the bulk of the review, to find that the director was Stephen Sondebergh, his name concealed - perhaps deliberately - in the blink immediately after the final hard cut; his anonymous-sounding cinematographer and editor are his own pseudonyms; that explains the quality of the visual composition, and the integrity of the aesthetic choices, and for once, it makes me think I'm not making it up when I see a lot of depth in what I'm watching.
The plot, too, is satisfying, intricate without being too complicated - as Mallory recounts the backstory, she gets her hostage to recite back names and details to her, to make sure the audience remembers them; it's hard to know if this is simply functional storytelling, or a deliberately postmodern trick, but it's effective regardless. There's also a rather satisfying ambiguity about the storyline, since it's unclear whether Mallory really gets her revenge, or whether she's simply manipulated into becoming a full-time assassin for the top bad guy.
So, this is a good film, but it's let down by the ending, which failed to add anything to what had come before, and thus failed to keep building up the pace.
This problem first appears in the lead-in to Act III, in which a chase sequence that fails to build enough tension is ended by a left-field twist so bizarre that I burst out laughing. I'm not sure if the jarring absurdity is deliberate or not. The main action of the third act was functional, very nicely shot in night-time greys overlaid by shadows, and in the concluding scenes, clear skies, stone backdrops and crisp lighting served to weave disparate elements of plot and place into an outwardly satisfying narrative; but for all that skill, the finale didn't provide any emotional payoff, and nor did it resolve anything physically or aesthetically, eschewing the impact of a final punch to the face - though that fits right in with the heroine's motivations and the ambiguity of the plotline, and I suspect it may even be a lead-in for a projected sequel.
And if that's the case, I don't think it's a bad thing at all.
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