Haywire

This week's movie rental was Haywire...

a 2011 action-thriller film directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring Gina Carano, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, and Michael Fassbender.

One interesting thing about the film is that actress Gina Carano is a professional martial artist and her abilities get showcased quite a bit. Also nice is that we get to see what Dublin's like. Is the movie great? Nope. Is it entertaining? Pretty much.

Roger Ebert gave the movie three out of four stars in his review. Here's a bit of it ...

[...] Soderbergh is a master craftsman whose work moves almost eagerly between genres. This is his first martial arts film, and he correctly assumes that the audience isn't interested in hearing a lot of dialogue. Lesser directors would use that as an excuse to rely entirely on action and lowball the words. Not Soderbergh and his screenwriter, Lem Dobbs, who wrote "Dark City," is the son of the famous painter R.B. Kitaj and lifted his pen name from the Bogart character in "Treasure of the Sierra Madre."

What they do is craft very precise words for a large group of supporting characters and fill those roles with surprisingly big names. The result is that the film (although its plot is preposterous nonsense) has weight and heft and places Mallory at the center of a diabolical labyrinth. Consider that a relatively little-known actress co-stars with Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas, and you realize that (1) Carano can hold her own, and (2) like Woody Allen, Soderbergh is one of those directors who can get just about anybody he wants to act in his movies ...