Haywire (2012)

I Haven’t Closed My Eyes Since You Were Born

Against my better judgment, I’ve been super interested in seeing today’s movie since I first heard about it.  It’s the screen debut of an MMA fighter that I’m a fan of along with a pretty spectacular supporting cast.  But, even though I felt like I really wanted to see it, something always held me back.  I’m not sure if I was afraid of seeing a movie with this fighter in it because I expected that person to not be able to act or if there was just never a good time to do it.  When I was in Arizona a few months back, I occupied myself by going to the movie theater frequently.  This movie was still in the theater there at the time, but the one or two shows it had did not align with the times I would be able to see it.  The time to see it in theaters had passed, so I set my sights on its RedBox release.  It came out on DVD and at RedBox on the same day, and the first thing I did was put it on reserve.  The time has finally come for my review of Haywire, written by Lem Dobbs, directed by Steven Soderbergh, and starring Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Channing Tatum, Bill Paxton, Michael Fassbender, Michael Angarano and Anthony Brandon Wong.

Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) is a mercenary of sorts that works for Kenneth (Ewan McGregor), who is also her former boyfriend.  She goes out on a successful mission to rescue a hostage named Jiang (Anthony Brandon Wong) along with another member of the private firm she works for named Aaron (Channing Tatum).  When Mallory returns home, Kenneth asks her to take a quick and easy assignment to pose as the wife of MI6 agent Paul (Michael Fassbender) on a stakeout.  At the party, Mallory sees Paul talking with his contact before entering a barn.  Later, she checks out the barn to find Jiang dead.  Mallory realizes that she’s been set up.  When they return to their hotel room, Paul attacks Mallory.  She whips that ass and kills him.  She then uses his cell phone to find out that Kenneth was the one that told Paul to kill her.  Mallory sets off to find out why she was set up, and make the ones who did it pay.

What a bummer.  I went into this movie with the expectation that Carano would not be able to hold up her end of the acting, but would make for some awesome fight scenes.  What I didn’t expect was that the only real problem I had with this movie would be completely at the fault of the director.  I found myself extremely annoyed with how slow this movie moved.  It was a complete artsy fartsy movie.  You may recall my complaints sounding similar in my review of the Ang Lee Hulk movie.  It seemed to me as if the director was really concerned about getting some interesting and stylized looks and camera angles, and not really concerned with making a movie that was interesting.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind my action movies having a nice artistic style.  But what an action movie needs above all that is pacing.  This movie chose to show boring and uneventful scenes in real time, as if I was watching a boring episode of 24.  During a chase scene on foot, the director uses footage of Carano running down an alley in a straight line for a good 30 seconds.  You can have really long foot chase scenes if you throw in a lot of things to break up the simple running, like jumping over cars or fences.  But when you just show me a lady running in a straight line I get to feeling like I’m watching track and field at the Olympics.  He also shows us about 10 minutes of Carano and Fassbender getting dressed for the party they’re going to and inspecting all their equipment.  I will take your word for it if you tell me these people are pros, so you don’t need to show me them inspecting their equipment.  I will also jump to the conclusion that they got dressed when they show up to the party with clothing on.  Later on, we get a long, drawn out scene of Carano walking down the street occasionally looking over to check that a guy is following her.  This goes on for like 5 minutes before it turns into a pretty boring chase scene.  I got to feeling like the director was doing all of these time wasting and boring things because he finished his movie and realized it was only 40 minutes long.  And, since it would make less money if they just put that version on TV, making it a full hour with commercials, he just decided to hit ‘Undo’ on all of the cuts that he made.

The action, when it happened, was very satisfying to me.  It was like watching an MMA fight, but in a more practical way because it was in a real life setting with no rules and some weapons in the mix.  But I like watching MMA, so I liked watching these fights too.  The fights smashed the hell out of the environments too.  The bulk of them were a little brief for my tastes, though.  The fight between Carano and Fassbender was particularly exciting, lasting for a pretty good stretch of fighting, using and destroying the environment.  The problem with this scene is that it probably would’ve been more impactful to see Fassbender attack Carano out of nowhere had they not spoiled it in every trailer I saw for the movie.

I had no complaints about the performances in this movie.  I would’ve assumed that Gina Carano wouldn’t have been that good of an actress, but I felt like she did good.  Some of the dialogue in the earlier scenes was a little flat, but I was more distracted by the fact that the dialogue was happening in scenes I had no reason to be watching to pay much attention to her performance.  Carano is a solid, good-looking woman, but never really made that much out of her looks in the movie.  She was there to whip ass, and she did.  I found it a little bit jarring at first to see fight scenes between a guy and a girl where neither one was holding back at all, but it would be ill-informed to hold back because Carano was a woman.  She’s a nearly undefeated MMA fighter!  Also, even though it was just made as a snide comment in the movie, I would completely endorse Carano to play Wonder Woman if they make a movie out of that.  It was surprising to me how many huge names they were able to get into this movie to support Carano, but all of the performances were fairly low key and didn’t give me much to talk about.

Haywire had the potential to be a solid action flick, but the director turned it into a stylized bore.  The action was great, but often too short and spread out too far.  The cast was fantastic, and Carano (though not fantastic) did manage to impress me for her first film.  This movie would’ve been fantastic if they had only edited about 40 minutes of boring scenes we didn’t need to see out of it.  As it is, I say you can skip it.  I look forward to seeing Carano in better action movies in the future, though.  Haywire gets “Bummer” out of “You shouldn’t think of her as being a woman.  That would be your first mistake.”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

Red State (2011)

Today I consider myself a professional movie reviewer because I received an early viewing of Kevin Smith’s newest and second to last movie, Red State.  …Okay, to be honest, I viewed it on iTunes in an early showing type thing for $10.  But still!  Red State stars Michael Parks, Melissa Leo, John Goodman, Kyle Gallner, Kerry Bishe, Michael Angarano, Stephen Root, and Kevin Smith’s wife, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith … and it rocks!

Red State starts off as the tale of 3 high schoolers lookin’ for some sexy time.  One of the kids, Jared (Kyle Gallner), finds a site on the interwebs where people can meet up to get laid.  The woman he meets on this site says she will take on him and his two friends, Travis (Michael Angarano) and Billy Ray (Nicholas Braun), so the 3 head out for some action.  On the way there, Travis accidentally sideswipes a car parked on the road and, when they go to investigate, a man pops up and startles them off.  Shortly thereafter, so does the man in his lap (GAY ROADSIDE NOOKIE!).  The 3 continue on and arrive at a trailer in the middle of nowhere where they are greeted by the woman, Sarah (Melissa Leo).  She accommodates them in her trailer with beers and the boys soon find out they’ve been drugged.  Meanwhile, at the police station, the man who was sideswiped earlier turns out to be the local law, Sheriff Wynan (Stephen Root), a closeted homosexual who can apparently oft times be found on the side of the road with men, unbeknownst to his wife.  He sends his deputy off to find the car that sideswiped him.

Jared wakes up in a cage, hearing a sermon.  He finds himself in the chapel of the Five Points Church, a group of religious nuts modeled after the Westboro Baptist Church.  The sermon is being delivered by their version of Fred Phelps, Pastor Abin Cooper (Michael Parks).  After his fire and brimstone “God hates fags”-type speech, he unveils a gay man saran wrapped to a cross and they proceed to shoot him in the head, dropping his corpse into a basement where Travis and Billy Ray are being held.  They then saran wrap Jared to the same cross.  Outside, the deputy arrives at the Five Points Church and sees the car that sideswiped the Sheriff.  The Pastor goes out to meet him and send him away.  Meanwhile, Billy Ray and Travis start to free themselves using the dead gay corpse’s exposed bone to cut their bindings.  Billy Ray leaves Travis to rot, but is soon shot by Ralph Garmin, who is then shot himself.  The deputy hears the shots and calls it in, and is then shot himself.  The Pastor threatens the Sheriff with photos of his roadside gayness in order to keep him silent.  The Sheriff makes a call and it gets to ATF Special Agent Keenan (John Goodman).  The rest of the movie is how self righteous, religious gun nuts react to someone trying to serve a search warrant to them.  Hint: it doesn’t go well.

I’ve got to say, I’m a huge Kevin Smith fan.  I own every movie he’s directed (yes, even CopOut) and I love the greater majority of them.  And lately, even more than his movies, I love him for his podcast/internet radio endeavors with Smodcast Internet Radio.  And, being an avid listener of Smodcast, I have been beaten over the head with this movie for a very long time now.  So when listening to his podcast and I realized I was still in time to catch this movie on iTunes, I could not pass up the opportunity.  So, let me say right now, Smith has not let me down.  This movie is great.  This is Smith’s first attempt to venture out of comedy (though his comedies have varied in comedic genre quite a bit) and into horror.  Well, he called it horror if memory serves.  I don’t know that I would call it horror.  It’s somewhere between horror and action to me.  I’d call it suspense.  This movie was absolutely riveting from start to finish.  As I usually do, I was attempting to play a video game while watching this movie on my computer, but I had to stop because my controller kept turning itself off from inactivity.  I couldn’t take my eyes off the thing!

This movie not only plays different from other Smith movies, it looks completely different.  A lot of his movies (Clerks excluded, of course) are pretty colorful movies.  This movie is dark and gritty, with a lot of the color really toned down, somewhat like what they did in Saving Private Ryan.  Also, as Smith himself tends to say, most of his movies don’t involve any movement for the camera.  And in a dialogue heavy movie as his usually are, that works fine.  This movie is filmed as if by a frantic bystander with a handheld camera and really draws the audience in to feeling like they are there amongst the religious craziness.

The acting continues the awesomeness of this movie.  A lot of the movie hangs around Kyle Gallner, and he is great.  I spent the entire movie trying to figure out where I’ve seen him, and it apparently was in the new Nightmare on Elm Street, Jennifer’s Body and the Haunting in Connecticut.  Good to see he’s finally allowed in a good movie.  Another big part of the movie is following Dan Connor … I mean John Goodman, who is also fantastic.  He had to be really conflicted about the orders he received in this movie and really did a great job, though I can’t say I expect much less from Goodman.  He seemed to have slimmed down a good amount for this movie too.  The driving factor of the whole movie has to be Michael Parks; a man most movie goers would recognize but not by name.  He was twice in Kill Bill and was pretty memorable in From Dusk Till Dawn too.  Oh man is he good in this.  He is freaky and charismatic at the same time, the kind of guy that would attract these kind of crazies.  And backing him up was recent award winner Melissa Leo who loses her shit after the death of her husband in this movie and may have freaked me out more than Parks.

If there was a complaint to be made of this movie, I’d say I wasn’t the biggest fan of the ending.  I don’t want to ruin it because I think you should all see this in whatever method you can, but suffice to say the ending is a little deus ex machina and unsatisfying to me, but nowhere near enough to ruin the movie.  Saying more would ruin it, so I shan’t.  Go see this movie!  I was happy to give my money to this movie in order to support a man that has given me so much enjoyment in his other movies while he takes his movie away from the studio system and brings it straight to the fans where it belongs.  And if Kevin Smith hasn’t brought you enjoyment through his movies or podcast, then I’m not sure how we are even friends.

My personal kudos to Kevin Smith for a job well done.  I will happily be purchasing this movie when it is released on DVD.  In the meantime, if this review goes up while it’s still available on iTunes, I fully recommend you go rent it there or almost anywhere else video on demand can be found (I think it’s on X-box live, Playstation Network, etc.).  It was only 10 bucks for me, and let’s face it, that’s how much a movie costs anyway, and iTunes will save you the drive.  And Kevin Smith shot his wife in the face for this movie!  …Okay he only wrote it in the script, but I saw it happen in the movie!  I give this a “I highly doubt God hates fags, but Robert loves Red State” out of Eleventeen.

And, as always, please rate, comment, and/or like this post and others.  It may help me get better.