Haywire (2012)

HAYWIRE  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Stephen Soderbergh
    Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum,
    Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas
"You're out of your element, aren't you?" Michael Fassbender asks Gina Carano at one point in "Haywire". She is, in more ways than one. They're at a swank party, and neither Carano nor the character she plays looks like somebody who feels at home in a slinky black dress. Fortunately, Carano's character, an assassin named Mallory, spends a lot less time posing at parties than she does wasting bad guys. It's a formula B-movie thriller (with an A-movie budget and cast), but Soderbergh has enough skill and respect for the genre to get it right. Going against the trend toward action scenes that favor speed over coherence, he dares to slow the chases down with longer takes that let you know where the characters are and what's going on. The locations are Dublin and Barcelona. Ewan McGregor sports the ugliest haircut he's had since "Trainspotting". Fassbender does an acceptable pseudo-James Bond. And Carano, a mixed martial-arts champion, kicks ass with more authority than most of her spindly, action-star counterparts. Angelina Jolie? Seriously, this girl would kill her.