Haywire

Haywire stars MMA & Muay Thai champion Gina Carano as a spy-for-hire who finds herself trapped in an espionage thriller made by people who appear to have no love for the genre.

We’ve all seen plenty of action thrillers headlined by women who look like they couldn’t hurt a fly.  I like waif-fu as much as the next guy, but let’s face it: force equals mass times acceleration.  I had a great time watching wafer-thin Zoe Saldana beat up grown men in Colombiana, for instance, but at no time did I believe her punches would actually hurt.  Gina Carano, on the other hand, is no waif: she looks like she knows her way around a steak dinner, she moves like the trained and experienced fighter she is, and I didn’t have to forcibly suspend my disbelief to accept her besting her foes.

Problem is, she’s a terrible actress.  Director Steven Soderbergh puts her onscreen with people like Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, and Michael Fassbender, and she comes across as wooden and overmatched.  I believed her when she was in action, but I couldn’t believe her when she was setting up the situations and motivations that put her in action.

And the action itself?  It isn’t much fun.  In fact, it feels like it was made by people who felt they were slumming.  The music just sits there, the fights are poorly edited, the double and triple crosses carry no heft, and the production has no sense of joy.  Compare Haywire with, say, Tai Chi Master.  Tai Chi Master is standard wuxia fare, but it’s made by people who love wuxia.  There’s an exuberance in the stunt work, the music, the performances, the editing, that you just won’t find in Haywire.

Look, I like action pictures.  I enjoy good fight choreography, I like fireballs as much as the next guy, and I’m a sucker for a good chase scene.  But you’ve got to meet me half way.  You’ve got to cast a lead who can act.  You’ve got to give your picture a sense of urgency and propulsion.  You’ve got to love the genre.  Haywire doesn’t, so I’m marking it down as one of Soderbergh’s failures.

Contagion

I used to work at a place that did professional wargaming.  Not the kind with little paper chits and 20-sided dice, but the kind in which we got a bunch of smart and capable people in a room, threw them a scenario, and analyzed how they did (or didn’t) work together to deal with the situation.  Contagion feels like a dramatization of one of those wargames.

The scenario: a highly contagious, deadly virus comes out of Macau, borne abroad by several of the thousands of international travelers who pass through in a given week.  It propagates around the world exponentially.  Player #1: you’re an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization.  Player #2: you’re the head of the CDC.  Player #3: Homeland security.  Player #4: a suburban city councilwoman at the American center of the epidemic.  Go.

Does it work in the film?  Yeah.  Likeable stars like Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, and Lawrence Fishburne put faces to dilemmas, helping us humanize the scope of the epidemic and empathize with their respective ethical and professional challenges.  The stories weave together fluidly, each informing the others and catching us up in their combined narrative.  The film rockets along and never feels like the dull procedural it could have become.  Contagion challenged and fascinated me, making me feel like I was back in the room of one of those wargames, moving things along and learning from the process.

Grim as the film’s subject matter surely is, I found it to be intellectually and emotionally satisfying.  I walked out thinking, “That’s how it could really play out.  Nice work.”  I haven’t changed my mind, even if I have changed my habits: I’m washing my hands more.

Solaris

A real exchange that occurred while viewing SOLARIS:

My Wife: "This is like a really long episode of Battlestar Galactica."
Me: "But dull."

I've decided that George Clooney is a major talent whose career is worth following. Consequently, I've been seeing some of his films that didn't particularly appeal to me, and SOLARIS numbers among them.

Here's the setup: Clooney is a grieving widow who is called to visit a space station and investigate the strange goings on there. The strangest thing about this station, I think, is that it's lit almost entirely in blue. Other than that, there's some stuff about alien dopplegangers who may be the personification of that which we love the most. Then again, they may not.

Frankly, I didn't care. SOLARIS is so portentious, so plodding, so, well, dull that I was just waiting for it to end.

Sure, Clooney is a major talent. But maybe that doesn't mean I have to see *all* of his movies.