BEFORE: I'm coming close to my last night working at the Manhattan movie theater, which will be on Tuesday, in two days. I worked on Thursday and even though they've been letting me go home earlier over the past week (because they re-hired the cleaners, but that's another story) it took me two hours to get home Thursday night (instead of the usual 30 minutes) because the L train in Brooklyn hit somebody on the tracks, and the whole line was shut down for hours. I tried to get home on the M train, but that didn't work either, and ended up taking the F train to Forest Hills in Queens, and my wife drove over to pick me up. I had late-night take-out with me, but I stupidly carried it home and didn't eat it for two hours. I should have just sat down somewhere in the subway station and ate my dinner, I think I had utensils in the bag, and waited for the L train to come back into service. What a dummy I am.
Tonight, my next-to-last night, there was some kind of power surge that not only knocked out all the theater's screens, but also the L train, so, once again, I had no way to get home. I couldn't even take the F train to Forest Hills again, because it wasn't stopping on 14th St. for some reason. So this time I sat in the 6th Avenue station, aboard a subway train that wasn't going anywhere BUT was air-conditioned, so why not be comfortable, and I ate part of my dinner right there on the non-moving train. My wife offered to come and pick me up again, but I told her no, I had confidence that the train WOULD eventually come back into service and bring me home - it took an hour but eventually I was proven right. There were many other people also sitting with me in the station on the non-moving train, they also must not have had any valid alternate route home, so really, what can you do but just wait for the service to be restored? I finally got home at about 12:15 am, after leaving work just after 10.
Michael Douglas carries over from "The Sentinel",
THE PLOT: A black ops super soldier seeks payback after she is betrayed and set up during a mission.
AFTER: OK, so that's two "set up government agent" films back-to-back, both with Michael Douglas in them, that's a coincidence - the luck of the draw, I guess. Yesterday's film was about a framed male Secret Service agent, today's film is about a framed female agent, a subcontractor for the, umm, CIA? I'm not entirely sure - but I think here Michael Douglas plays a CIA agent, who hired another company to do some black ops, and they in turn hired Mallory Kane, the central figure here. Who, once again, is female, and that's the thing that really distinguishes this film from most secret-agent stories, which have traditionally been about male characters.
I'm pretty hard-pressed to think of action movies with female leads - the recent "Black Widow", of course, then there's "Red Sparrow, "The Hunger Games", "Wonder Woman" - that's pretty much it, except for "Kill Bill" Parts 1 + 2, and older movies like "Foxy Brown". But if you eliminate super-hero movies and just focus on movies about secret agents, are there really very many "Jane Bond" type roles out there? "Atomic Blonde", right, that's one, but any others? And I don't mean comedies like "Spy" or "The Spy Who Dumped Me", I mean (mostly) realistic action movies with female spies or agents. I came up with "Salt", "Hanna" and "The Debt", then I couldn't think of any more.
This one's already ten years old, and until I put it on my list this year, I'd never heard of it before. Was it groundbreaking when it got released in 2011, or somehow ahead of its time? The lead actress here, Gina Carano, became famous as a MMA fighter, then got more famous after appearing in the Star Wars series "The Mandalorian", but then got caught up in "cancel culture" after mocking the use of face masks against COVID, repeating baseless claims of voter fraud in social media, and clashing with activists over her lack of support for Black Lives Matter. Then, to make matters worse, she apparently compared shaming someone for their political views to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust. Whoopsie. Hope you enjoyed fame while you had it, Gina, but it's pretty hard to bounce back from that one. One year you're voted "Hottest Woman in America", and a few years later you may get dropped from your talent agency because of your controversial tweets.
Which may be a shame, because there's a lot to like about this movie, and it's long overdue that we're starting to see women in starring roles in action films. The most jarring thing about that, for me personally, was seeing a man hit a woman on film - I mean, I know it's a choreographed fight, but a couple times in this movie, a man hits Carano's character, like square on the jaw. And that's shocking, because you usually only see that when the story is about domestic abuse or something, but here it's a real(ish) FIGHT, and she comes back and hits the guy, then takes him down. It still doesn't feel right to see a man hit a woman, but if she wins that fight, then maybe it's a little less wrong?
SPOILERS AHEAD - please TURN BACK now if you haven't seen "Haywire"...
They sort of start this story in the middle, with Mallory Kane on the run in upstate New York, meeting with her contact who's supposed to bring her in, only that doesn't go well. After a fight in a small town diner and a rapid escape in some stranger's car, Mallory relates the story of how things came to be like this, the assignment that took her to Barcelona to rescue a Chinese official, and then another assignment in Dublin, pretending to be the wife of an M16 agent, who's going to meet with a contact and try to turn him over to our side. But the Dublin mission was a setup, the agent was going to frame Mallory for murder, then kill her in "self-defense". Could this secret mission objective have anything to do with Mallory's employer, who also happens to be her ex-boyfriend? Some people just leave a break-up note....
I usually HATE stories that start in the middle like this, it's very Tarantino, and Quentin's one of the few people who knows how to properly do this, like in "Hateful Eight" and "Pulp Fiction", doubling back to give the audience key information out of order, and only revealing those things when they become relevant. "Haywire" was directed by Stephen Soderbergh, and he also seems to have a proper handle on this technique, so I guess I have to start giving him allowances also, he's proven here that he knows what he's doing. Starting this story in Barcelona would have been a mistake, as much as I hate to admit it, that would reveal too much too soon, so backtracking to show those two missions in flashback was really the best way to structure it.
Also starring Gina Carano (last seen in "Heist" (2015)), Ewan McGregor (last seen in "Mortdecai"), Michael Fassbender (last seen in "X-Men: Dark Phoenix"), Bill Paxton (last seen in "The Circle"), Channing Tatum (last heard in "Smallfoot"), Antonio Banderas (last seen in "Dolittle"), Michael Angarano (last seen in "The Art of Getting By"), Mathieu Kassovitz (last seen in "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets"), Eddie J. Fernandez (last seen in "The Last Stand"), Anthony Brandon Wong (last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn"), J.J. Perry, Tim Connolly (last seen in "Gemini Man"), Maximino Arciniega, Aaron Cohen, Natascha Berg, Julian Alcaraz,
RATING: 6 out of 10 autographed spy novels
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