HAYWIRE
Steven Soderbergh
Stephen Soderbergh's sheer output of material is amazing. He directed 3 features in 2011. I have a respect for him stemming from the fact that he also is director of photography on all of his recent films and he has cultivated a unique shooting style. He frequently uses non-actors in major roles namely Sasha Grey (although she has some "acting" under her belt) in The Girlfriend Experience, and the entire cast of Bubble. He pioneered shooting features in HD and releasing them simultaneously on cable and in theaters, as well as championed the use of RED digital cameras.
Aesthetically, Haywire is beautiful. It's shot with anamorphic lenses and every lens flare swells horizontally across the screen. It was interesting to see the low-light performance of the RED Epic camera on the big screen and it is apparent that this movie is shot on video, getting a little noisy at times. Soderbergh has an affection for shooting in fluorescent lighting (parking garages, government offices, hospitals) but for whatever reason tends to color balance these scenes to look more yellow than the typical bluish green.
The lead, Gina Carano, is most well known for her MMA career and furthers Soderbergh's experimentation with non-actors. Haywire hinges on a standard revenge plot so it makes perfect sense to cast an actress with more training in combat than acting. It is interesting to note that her voice is lowered digitally, perhaps to eliminate the risk of sounding too sweet before breaking a man's arm.
The ultra-dry-dialogue-heavy scenes occur far from the action and helps build narrative tension by excluding Carano's character almost entirely, leaving her to put together the pieces as wave after wave of armed men try to take her out. Michael Douglas and Ewan McGregor conspire in cozy office chairs while Carano leaps from building to building dodging machine gun fire. The fight scenes are intense as the musical score drops out, leaving the agonizing sounds of body hits and throats gasping for air.
As far as I'm concerned, Soderbergh is the king of churning out visually interesting (non-CG) popcorn movies. This isn't going to win any awards, but it shows that action movies can maintain an arthouse sensibility without being soft. Haywire doesn't stray far from anything in the Ocean's franchise, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Brian Boeckman
