Haywire (2012, Steven Soderbergh): Daddy's Girl is Not Happy...

Far less allusive or puzzle-complex as their collaboration on 1999's new-wavy The Limey, Steven Soderbergh's and Lem Dobbs' Haywire is a frenetic concept piece, dirty pulp layered over with the patina of cinema art house, another descendant of John Boorman's 1967 Point Blank. The Limey was a searcher revenge tale, with a rough Cockney Terence Stamp as a father looking to avenge his daughter's death. Kicking her way through various set-pieces in Barcelona, Dublin, 'Upstate New York' and New Mexico, Gina Carano is Mallory Kane, a daddy's girl who doesn't need her dad's help. 'It would be a mistake to think of her as a woman' one of the film's evil men tells another of the film's evil men towards the end of this cinema-cyclone. But underestimate her, they all do. Carano isn't Meryl Streep, nor meant to be (I am pretty sure she does her own stunts and motorcycle riding) but you knew that going in, right? Her physicality is something to see, in a diner in New York or a hotel in Dublin; When she slips out of her spiky heels in the hallway before entering a suite with Michael Fassbinder, you know, intuitively, it is time for room service.  And Haywire is much better intuited than thought out. Just enjoy the deer through the windshield; don't spend too much time dissecting the deus ex machina. Along with Fassbinder,  you can see Ewan MacGregor, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum, and Michael Douglas as the boys helping her out, or, more likely, in her way.