Haywire: Kicking Ass and Making Names
[There was a video here]
Here's a trailer for Haywire, Steven Soderbergh's upcoming scorned secret agent on a rampage of revenge movie. It looks pretty revengey!
The thing of note here is that, as he did with Sasha Grey in The Girlfriend Experience, Soderbergh has cast a non-actor in the lead role. Instead of the porn industry, this time Soderbergh turned to the world of mixed martial arts fighting, appropriate for this kind of movie, and found the raven-haired beauty (and Sasha lookalike, almost) Gina Carano. So that's kind of a fun experiment! Obviously she'll be great in the fight scenes, but hows about those, y'know, talking and emoting scenes? Well, it's hard to tell from this trailer, though it doesn't look like she'll have much talking to do anyway.
The most surprising part of this brief reel is how kinda, well, cheesy the movie seems. I know Soderbergh likes doing that thing where he tweaks genres — he's got the disease thriller Contagion, the espionage "thriller" The Informant!, and now this, among others — but usually the trick is that he arts everything up, smartening and smoothing the edges of rough-hewn tropes. But maybe not so with this? Maybe this is just a straight-up hard-boiled who-cares-about-dialogue butt-kicker. Maybe! Either way, it could be an interesting little movie. Or, y'know, she Carano could prove a terrible actress and the whole thing could be silly like Point of No Return or kiiinda boring like The American. Odds seem 50/50.