“Haywire” or advanced ass-kicking for girls

All right!!  I have to say; don’t believe it when Dr Pepper 10 tells you that women don’t like action movies.  I LOVE a good ass-kicking movie.  It can even be a fairly bad movie from the story perspective, as long as the action is tight! It’s even better if the story makes sense.

This film falls into the second category.  Deliberately made to look like a B-Movie, or even an exploitation movie, but with an A-Movie cast, it sports a color palette that moves back and forth from a blue gray color to a washed-out yellow  and looks like you parent’s old photos from 1972.

The movie is something of a dichotomy.  The male portion of the cast reads like a Who’s Who of contemporary Hollywood; Channing Tatum, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, and Bill Paxton.  While the female portion on the cast is just the relatively unknown Gina Carano, former American Gladiator and MMA fighter.

Carano is not the best actress in the world, at the beginning of the movie she seems a little bit stiff, but to make up for that she brings an easy athleticism to her role that make her totally believable as Mallory Kane, a former marine now working as a mercenary for a private security company.

The story follows Mallory as she completes a job rescuing, what she believes is a kidnapped Asian scientist, but all is not as it seems.  Soon she learns that she has been used to kidnap a murder a foreign journalist.  Mallory begins a rampage directed at the men who lied to her and used her as their patsy. 

Carano inhabits the character of Mallory with a relaxed confidence that makes you believe she can handle any situation, and her extreme competence with all aspects of the physical action easily convinces that viewer that they are watching an action star.  You cannot help saying “cool!” about the way she runs up the wall and lands on her target pinning him to the ground. This movie should lead her to much bigger and better things.  And the ending is spot on.