“Haywire,” a new action film from “Ocean’s 11” director Steven Soderbergh isn’t so much a movie as it is a showcase for the lithe athleticism of its star Gina Carano. Imagine an MMA match with a storyline and you get the idea.
Carano, the former champion mixed martial arts fighter, plays Mallory Kane, a mercenary who specializes in the dirty jobs that governments like to freelance out. Her idea of relaxation is “a glass of wine and gun maintenance.” Following a successful hostage rescue in Barcelona her handler Kenneth (Ewan McGregor) dispatches her to Dublin. There she teams with an MI5 operative (Michael Fassbender) only to discover she has been double-crossed. Angry, she Muay Thai’s herself back to the United States searching for clues and revenge.
Does the story mater? Nope. Not one bit. It’s the usual medium to complicated undercover spy tale—the kind that wraps up all the loose ends with a bit of exposition and some well chosen flashbacks at the end—but you don’t go to see “Haywire” for the story.
The movie is at it’s best when Carano is on the move, running, jumping, and kicking the snot out of her opponents. Soderbergh tosses in an action scene every ten minutes or so, but the violence here feels different. Sure necks get broken and people get shot in the face but unlike most action flicks Soderbergh doesn’t amp up the sound to go along with the punches, kicks and gunshots. Many films exaggerate the combat noises to add excitement, “Haywire” doesn’t. It trusts the fight choreography and because the violence isn’t particularly cartoony it doesn’t need to be juiced up.
The fights feel authentic—no CGI, few stunt people—a testament to Carano’s obvious fighting skills and Soderbergh’s wise decision to underplay the violence.
“Haywire” feels like a grrrl power version of a mid-80s Jean-Claude Van Damme movie. Of course it is elevated by the presence of actors like Fassbender, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas and Bill Paxton but at its heart it is a scrappy action movie that would play best in drive-ins and grindhouses.
In The Sentinel Michael Douglas plays a long time secret service agent who is the prime suspect in a plot to assassinate the President of the United States. On the run, he is tracked by his former protégé, a hotshot agent played by Keifer Sutherland and a rookie in the form of Desperate Housewife Eva Longoria. It’s a stylishly directed thriller that feels cobbled together from the outtakes of older, better movies like In the Line of Fire. It even borrows from so not so great movies like Murder at 1600 and The Kidnapping of the President.
Like the recent film Inside Man from Spike Lee, The Sentinel is a by- the-book b-movie that is slightly elevated by the direction. It looks great, but the clichéd scripting really deflates any excitement that Canadian director Clark Johnson gets going—we’ve simply seen these characters and situations too many times before for them to have much impact. It’s too bad that the dialogue sounds like it was ripped from the pages of a Dick Tracy comic because there are a couple of sequences that are quite exciting. A shoot-out in a busy shopping mall briefly quickens the movie’s pace but it isn’t enough to earn a recommendation.
The script is so flat it manages to make Eva Langoria seem bland, quite a feat when you have an actress who created one of the most interesting characters on prime time television in the form of the conniving Gabrielle on Desperate Housewives.
The Sentinel isn’t an awful movie, it just isn’t a very memorable or interesting one.
“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” the long awaited sequel to Oliver Stone’s 1987 Oscar winning film Wall Street, is bogged down by financial claptrap. The explanation of how Wall Street ended up in Bailout City is almost endless. Money terms like short selling, moral hazard and derivative are tossed around like coins down a wishing well. Luckily a lot of the dialogue is delivered by good actors like Frank Langella and Michael Douglas, but ultimately the whole experience is kind of like watching an episode of Mad Money with better looking people.
Shia LaBeouf, continuing his resurrection of 1980s film franchises, plays Jacob Moore, a Wall Street trader with a conscious—a mix of greed and green. He’s ploughing millions of dollars into sustainable energy, but just as a major project is on the brink of a breakthrough the bottom falls out, his firm goes bankrupt and his mentor (Frank Langella) commits suicide. At home things are better. His girlfriend Winnie is devoted to him. She’s also the estranged daughter of Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) the disgraced inside trader recently released from prison. Jacob and Gekko make a deal—a non financial one. Jacob will facilitate a reconciliation between father and daughter and Gekko will help find out who was responsible for the rumors that led to death of Jacob’s mentor. The question is, can Gekko, who once famously said, “Greed is good,” be trusted?
“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” shows how Wall Street fell due to crashing markets and clashing egos. Stone wants us to understand how it all fell apart, but unfortunately the inner workings of banks and big financial deals, at least the way they are presented here, aren’t that dramatic. Real people losing their jobs, their homes, their bank accounts, that’s dramatic, but a bunch of bankers sitting around talking about money is less so. Stone fails to listen to his own creation, Gekko, when he says, “it’s not about the money, it about the game.” Unfortunately the game is a little dull.
The cautionary message about greed and its effects is good and timely—“Bulls make money. Bears make money,” says Gekko, “Pigs get slaughtered.”—but it is wrapped up in a movie that is too earnest and a little odd tone wise. A meeting between Gekko and Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), the man responsible for sending him to jail in the first movie, is played for laughs which seems out of place, and frankly, kind of unlikely. Stone tries to cram too much story into the film—the father-daughter story, the meltdown angle, the revenge plot, the Gekko comeback—and with each of those plot shards comes a different tone.
Like the people who caused the financial meltdown that inspired this “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” director Stone seems to have lost perspective. He draws good performances from the cast—Douglas could be nominated for a second time for playing Gekko, and LaBeouf is very good—but allows the rest of the movie to get as bloated as Lehman Brothers on a spending spree.
Sometimes it seems like Hollywood is obsessed with infidelity, both on screen and off.
Celebrity cheating scandals—Jesse and the porn star, Tiger and, well, everyone—covered the front pages recently, and Zsa Zsa Gabor once famously said, ‘How many husbands have I had? You mean apart from my own?”
Even supposedly happily-ever-after-Tinseltown-couples preemptively guard against unfaithfulness by signing “cheat-proof” prenups. Catherine Zeta-Jones has a legal infidelity clause with Michael Douglas and it’s rumoured that Denise Richards and Charlie Sheen signed one worth more than $4 million.
In this weekend’s The Dilemma — a funny take on infidelity — Vince Vaughn discovers his best friend’s wife is having an affair. There have been adultery comedies before but usually on screen in American films there is a price to be paid for matrimonial betrayal. Ever since the first cheating Hollywood movie, 1915’s Infidelity, movies like The End of the Affair, Body Heat and Derailed have shown the consequences of bed hopping, but one movie stands head and shoulder above the rest as a cautionary tale.
Fatal Attraction begins with Michael Douglas, a married man, who has a fling with Glenn “I’m not gonna be ignored!” Close. When he tries to break off their affair, she becomes a lesson in why not to cheat on your wife.
The film was a sensation in 1987 and its most famous clip, the rabbit boiling on the stove, even inspired a phrase in the Urban Dictionary. According to the website, cook your rabbit “refers to the moment when someone goes over the edge in their obsession with another person.”
Fatal Attraction was a box office bonanza, inspiring a number of imitators including The Crush, Single White Female and a spoof called Fatal Instinct.
More poignant is Same Time Next Year, the story of a 26-year affair. Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn star as an extramarital couple who rendezvous once a year from youth to old age. Based on a stage play by Canadian Bernard Slade, it’s a nice mix of humour — when asked how many kids he has Alda lies, saying two rather than three. “I thought it would make me seem less married,” he says — and emotion.
Perhaps the strangest infidelity movie on our list is Come With Me My Love, a supernatural tale about a man who kills his cheating wife, then commits suicide, only to come back as a ghost 50 years later to haunt his old apartment.
