Taglines: They left her no choice.
Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) enters a diner in Upstate New York and waits. A car arrives and Aaron (Channing Tatum) joins her. After a short conversation about their employer, Aaron orders Mallory to get in his car. She refuses, and they fight, with Aaron nearly capturing Mallory before the intervention of Scott (Michael Angarano), a customer in the diner, allows Mallory to break Aaron’s arm, knock him unconscious, and escape with Scott in Scott’s car.
Mallory tells Scott that both she and Aaron are contractors with a private firm employed by the American government for covert operation assignments. One week before, at a meeting among government agent Coblenz (Michael Douglas), his contact, Rodrigo (Antonio Banderas), and Mallory’s ex-boyfriend and the firm’s director Kenneth (Ewan McGregor), the firm was hired to rescue Jiang (Anthony Brandon Wong), who is being held in Barcelona. Mallory and her team, which includes Aaron, succeed in rescuing Jiang and delivering him to Rodrigo.
Shortly thereafter, Mallory is approached by Kenneth, who insists she undertake what he claims is an easy assignment: pose as the wife of British agent Paul (Michael Fassbender) during a mission in Dublin. Mallory agrees and accompanies Paul to a party at Russborough House, where they meet with his contact, Studer (Mathieu Kassovitz).
Paul meets with Studer again as Mallory watches from afar. She sees Paul go into a barn, and after he leaves she enters it to find Jiang dead, clutching in his hand a brooch which Kenneth required her to wear as a recognition signal for her initial contact with Paul.
Mallory realizes she has been set up and returns to her hotel room, where she is attacked by Paul. They fight, Mallory gets the upper hand and eventually shoots Paul dead. Mallory calls Kenneth from Paul’s phone and Kenneth reveals that he’s aware of the set-up before realizing it’s Mallory he’s speaking to. As Mallory leaves her hotel, she evades what are presumably Kenneth’s agents tailing her, but a SWAT team appears and tries to arrest her. She escapes after a chase, and manages to enter the United States and reach the diner, where she meets Scott.
Mallory calls Rodrigo from Dublin and asks him whether it was he or Kenneth who set her up, then hangs up. This prompts Rodrigo to call Coblenz, who then calls Mallory. Coblenz tells Mallory that he has had suspicions about Kenneth for some time. Coblenz then contacts Kenneth and tells him to inform Mallory’s father, John Kane (Bill Paxton), (who already knows of his daughter’s occupation), of her crimes.
Meanwhile, on the road, Mallory and Scott are chased by the police and hit a tree after a deer runs into Scott’s car. They are both arrested, but soon the convoy is ambushed by assassins posing as federal agents sent by Kenneth. Mallory escapes, kills one of the assassins, and releases Scott. She gives him a number to call for protection and leaves to meet with her father.
Mallory reaches her father’s house in New Mexico before Kenneth, Aaron, and two additional men arrive, posing as the police, to interrogate John on his daughter’s whereabouts. Aaron starts to realize, after receiving a photograph on his phone of Jiang lying dead, that Mallory might have been set up. He tries to press Kenneth for the truth, but Kenneth shoots him in the abdomen and escapes as Mallory takes out his men. Aaron apologizes to Mallory, and eventually dies in her arms of excessive blood loss.
The following day Mallory meets with Coblenz, who reveals that he ordered Kenneth to contact Mallory’s father so she could kill him there. Mallory asks Coblenz to fix things with Scott, which he promises to do. Coblenz also informs Mallory of Kenneth’s location. Before Mallory leaves, Coblenz offers her a government job but she replies only that she’ll let him know, after she finds Kenneth.
In Mexico, Mallory confronts Kenneth at the beach and they fight. Kenneth tries to escape, but gets his foot twisted and jammed between two rocks. Kenneth reveals that Jiang was a journalist who had written a series of articles exposing Studer’s crimes. Knowing that Mallory planned to leave his firm, Kenneth arranged for her to rescue Jiang and deliver him to Rodrigo, who then delivered him to Studer, who killed him.
Kenneth then framed Mallory, planning to cut all ties that could lead to him by convincing Paul that Mallory was a double agent whom he should kill. With all crimes being blamed on Mallory, Paul would eventually run free claiming to have killed her in self-defense. Disgusted, Mallory leaves Kenneth to drown in the incoming tide for his betrayal.
Haywire is a 2011 American action thriller film directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring Gina Carano, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas, and Michael Douglas. Carano, a mixed martial arts fighter, performs her own stunts in the film. The score is by Northern Irish DJ and composer David Holmes.
Carano is cast as Mallory Kane, an operative who works for a company that handles sensitive “black operations” covertly so that the government can maintain plausible deniability, and who is targeted for assassination by a conspiracy that she is forced to unravel.
Haywire was released on January 20, 2012 with an opening weekend gross of $8.4 million, and has earned $18.9 million in the United States and $32.4 million worldwide. David Holmes composed the score for the film and had worked with Steven Soderbergh on various other projects such as Out Of Sight and the Ocean’s Trilogy.
The film has received generally positive reviews from critics. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 80% based on 181 reviews. The site’s critical consensus is “Haywire is a fast and spare thriller, with cleanly staged set pieces that immerse you in the action.”[5] Metacritic gives it a weighted average score of 67/100 based on reviews from 40 critics.
Claudia Puig of USA Today stated that the film was “a vigorous spy thriller that consistently beckons the viewer to catch up with its narrative twists and turns. Bordering on convoluted, it works best when in combat mode.” Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com shared a similar view, saying “Haywire is a lean, clean production, shot and edited by Soderbergh himself and utterly free of the incoherent action sequences and overcooked special effects that plague similarly scaled Hollywood pictures.”
Richard Corliss of Time said “Carano is her own best stuntwoman, but in the dialogue scenes she’s all kick and no charisma. The MMA battler lacks the conviction she so forcefully displayed in the ring. She is not Haywire’s heroine but its hostage.” Keith Uhlich of Time Out New York wrote, “There’s shockingly little thrill in watching Carano bounce off walls and pummel antagonists.
Haywire (2012)
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Gina Carano, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, Michael Angarano, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Aaron Cohen, Julian Alcaraz, Anthony Brandon Wong, Max Arciniega
Screenplay by: Lem Dobbs
Production Design by: Howard Cummings
Cinematography by: Steven Soderbergh
Film Editing by: Steven Soderbergh
Costume Design by: Shoshana Rubin
Set Decoration by: Barbara Munch
Art Direction by: James F. Oberlander
Music by: David Holmes
MPAA Rating: R for some violence.
Distributed by: Relativity Media
Release Date: January 20, 2012
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