She kicks a** (just like a woman)

In Haywire, two men — Ewan McGregor and Michael Fassbender — are in a bar, conspiring to double-cross government assassin Mallory Kane (mixed martial arts world champion Gina Carano). McGregor, playing devious boss Kenneth, tells British MI6 agent Paul (Fassbender) where and when to take her out.

“I’ve never done a woman before,” muses Paul over his double scotch.

“Don’t think of her as a woman,” chirps Kenneth. “That would be a mistake.”

Indeed, at first it’s hard to think of Carano as particularly feminine in Steven Soderbergh’s thriller Haywire (a too-generic title). She’s pretty scary-looking, in fact. With her steely expression, square jaw and fighter’s build, you first glimpse her at a roadside diner booth, staring straight ahead in smoky raccoon makeup. La Femme Nikita comes to mind. Before the makeover, that is.

From day to night: Martial arts champion Gina Carano can pull off black ops couture as well as the little black dress in Haywire.

In walks Aaron (Channing Tatum), a colleague in the assassin game, who tries to coax Mallory to come in, sit down with Kenneth, work things out. Failing that, he flings a cup of hot coffee in her face and tries to drag her by the hair. Big mistake. They tussle. Hard. And in short order we get to see the kind of Bruce Lee fury onscreen that outkicks and outpunches both volumes of Kill Bill.

Carano is a star in her own right, known to fans as “Crush” on TV’s American Gladiators, and a genuine champion in mixed martial arts. It might be a stretch to think of her carrying a Soderbergh movie, but he’s in the habit now of casting real-life folk (like porn star Sasha Grey playing, well, a hooker in The Girlfriend Experience). Apparently, he saw Carano in action and thought she’d make a kick-ass star. Indeed, think of her as the female Jason Bourne in this revenge thriller written by Lem Dobbs: no special effects needed, just heart-pumping chases, swiveling kicks to the head and face-pounding blows. Carano seems well at ease when those fists and feet are flying, but what’s cool is how she can slip into a sexy evening gown just as easily, pairing up with Fassbender to play his wife in order to infiltrate a Dublin party.

Okay, she doesn’t exactly light up the screen with acting chops or charisma; but Carano more than makes up for it with jujitsu chops and kinetic energy. Women kicking ass has become a Hollywood sub-genre. There are hints of Luc Besson’s Nikita here, as well as Salt, the Angelina Jolie action vehicle from a couple years back; also something of Kick-Ass’s Hit Girl and Big Daddy echoed in the relationship between Mallory and her ex-Marine dad (Bill Paxton), as well as Tarantino’s Kill Bill (Mallory has her own payback list to tick off).

All choked up: Ewan McGregor, playing a double-dealing government weasel, is choked out.

But it also resembles Soderbergh’s earlier flick The Limey starring Terence Stamp — an elaborate revenge tale told in crisscrossing flashbacks, also written by Dobbs. Once again notable is the retro-cool music by David Holmes, who scored Out of Sight among other Soderbergh flicks. (If you want faux ‘70s funk flowing on your soundtrack, Holmes is your man.)

The tale is spun in typical non-linear Soderbergh fashion. Quick cuts without sound flashback us to an “extraction” in Barcelona gone wrong: a Chinese dissident is to be recovered for a private client (Rodrigo, played by Antonio Banderas), arranged by US government spook Coblenz (Michael Douglas). Mallory is specifically requested for her skills, and joins Aaron in Barcelona. Although the Chinese dissident is safely recovered and turned over, Mallory learns the whole thing was a setup while working with Fassbender in Dublin.

After that, the movie is basically a roller-coaster chase-and-fight flick, with clever dashes over Dublin rooftops and down alleyways, high-speed reverse car crashes involving dead deer, and tons of ass-kicking. (Most dust-ups are played without background music, allowing you to hear, say, the ding of Channing Tatum’s head against a barstool more clearly.) After fleeing the diner, Mallory coerces a ride from a customer named Scott (Michael Angarano), during which she unspools the preceding events in Barcelona and Dublin. This seems highly implausible — a professional assassin sharing her life story with a stranger during a carjacking — but the flashbacks need some kind of push. Since this is a Soderbergh movie, you’ll have to think a bit to assemble all the disparate pieces (the first 10 minutes are an exercise in “WTF is going on?”), but as post-Oscar popcorn entertainment goes, Haywire actually delivers.

Tussle: Carano and Michael Fassbender engage in some bedroom activity in Steven Soderbergh’s thriller.

Many viewers, though, seem to expect Soderbergh to swing between the extremes of “high art” and “low art” in his films, which is puzzling. Sure, he does art-house quite well, such as his debut, sex lies and videotape, and he occasionally succumbs to vanity projects, such as Schizopolis and Full Frontal. But the bulk of his work is about repackaging genres in ultra-cool trappings — the neo-noir of Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight, or the blatantly commercial Ocean’s Eleven heist films. In short, there are not two cut-and-dried categories for Soderbergh, not even the “one for them, one for me” mantra. Films like the crowd-pleasing Erin Brockovich were allowed to co-exist with the grittier Traffic, simply because Soderbergh had the energy to do both. (Perhaps even that energy is waning, though: he reportedly wants to retire and “paint” after his next, er, four projects.)

One valid criticism is that Soderbergh’s films often come off as cold and distant, not allowing much more than a surface connection to characters. (For instance, last year’s Contagion, while a crack medical thriller, didn’t exactly warm the cockles; Out of Sight, Traffic, sex lies and videotape are notable exceptions.) In Haywire, the problem is magnified by the dead-ma expressive range of Carano. While Soderbergh’s a cerebral director who knows how to push moviegoer buttons — a trait he shares with Steven Spielberg — few of his films make you actually love his characters, or even root for them.

In Haywire, you do root for Mallory, though it’s probably just your adrenalin talking.