X-MEN: FIRST CLASS: Killing Will Not Bring You Peace

X-Men: First Class (2011) – Directed by Matthew Vaughn – Starring Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Rose Byrne, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Bacon, January Jones, Nicholas Hoult, Zoe Kravitz, Caleb Landry Jones, Lucas Till, Edi Gathegi, Jason Flemyng, Alex Gonzalez, Oliver Platt, Ray Wise, Michael Ironside, James Remar, Glenn Morshower, Matt Craven, Annabelle Wallis Rebecca Romijn, and Hugh Jackman.

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is a staggeringly great movie, and an incredibly important one, as it offers some variety from the standard superhero movie.

It seems almost inconceivable to me that we have now been blessed with so many superhero movies that a bit of malaise is starting to infect the genre. When Green Lantern tanked (tanked being a relative term in Hollywood), the we-all-knew-it-was-coming speculation posts started coming about the “end of the genre” and that people were suffering from superhero burnout.

Right.

Released within weeks of each other, FIRST CLASS took in $353 million at the international box office, while Green Lantern brought in $222 million. A month later Captain America: The First Avenger hit theaters and scored a $368 million haul. The Avengers? $1.5 billion. The Dark Knight Rises? $1 billion. The Amazing Spider-Man? $750 million.

Importantly, most of these films offer something different: there’s a World War II story, the ultimate fanboy movie, an incredibly serious story, and a teen angst story. Even Green Lantern offered something different in a cosmic story (though, really, the film over-marketed the cosmic and then delivered a largely earthbound snoozefest), and so the idea that people were “burned out” on superheroes as the DC/Warner Brothers folks tried to tell us rang false, and gave more evidence to the notion that the House of Warner does not understand how to make a superhero movie as well as their Mouse-owned counterparts. Success with DC characters seems much more random, while over at Marvel, there’s a point man in Kevin Fiege and a consolidated approach on how to make movies that feel like they occur in the same universe without all looking and sounding the same.

FIRST CLASS, of course, is produced over at Fox (and Spidey’s film rights are held by Sony), and Marvel’s Cinematic Universe was able to build on what Bryan Singer and Sam Raimi and David Goyer’s BLADE movies had done, and take superheroes to a new place. But really, I think the lesson that we can learn from Green Lantern and subsequent superhero movies is that simply making a movie about a superhero isn’t a guaranteed success. People still want good movies, and will still respond to good movies (more often than not), if they are marketed properly.

Which brings me back to X-MEN: FIRST CLASS.

When I decided back at the beginning of the summer that I was going to review all superhero movies in order to collect them and release them as book, I wanted to save FIRST CLASS for last because it was the biggest superhero film that I hadn’t seen. I thought it would make a nice bow on the reviewing cake, and even though at some point this summer I realized I would need to break the superhero review book into three volumes (1 for Marvel, 1 for DC, and 1 for everything else) and concentrated on the Marvel films, FIRST CLASS is still the biggest release I had not watched, and thus serves as a fitting end to my run through all of Marvel’s cinematic releases.

FIRST CLASS is a fantastic movie, and does the smart thing to offer us something new. The original X-MEN trilogy had sputtered to a clumsy, tired ending with THE LAST STAND, but FIRST CLASS is not just a breath of fresh air, but an entire new weather front moving in. FIRST CLASS manages to both reaffirm the superhero genre as it gives us something that doesn’t look like anything else.

Set in the 1960s, FIRST CLASS is still told in the same universe as the X-MEN trilogy, and it does a marvelous job of being its own film while still throwing some easter eggs in there to connect this film with the Singer films. If you’ve been reading the Anxiety all summer, you know that I loved Avengers, and really liked both Dark Knight Rises and Amazing Spider-Man. My reaction to FIRST CLASS is much more similar to my reaction to Avengers, in that as soon as I was done watching it, I wanted to watch it immediately again. Which, since I was watching the Blu-ray, I could.

More than any other superhero film, FIRST CLASS thrives on style. There’s a good story here, but there are holes and missed beats throughout the film, yet this subtly styled 1960s vibe is just incredibly engaging to immerse oneself in.

It helps that FIRST CLASS is an incredibly confident movie. Helmed by Matthew Vaughn, FIRST CLASS is entirely comfortable with what it is and what it wants to do, so there’s no apologizing for being a superhero movie set during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I have not ever watched Mad Men, but I get the sense that my reaction to FIRST CLASS is similar to many people’s reaction to that show (and not just because of the January Jones connection) in that it’s just a lot of fun t watch an American costume drama.

Because that’s what FIRST CLASS is – a costume drama with superheroes, oozing with equal parts 1960s cool and sexism. Vaughn has literally stuffed his film with stars, bringing in actors like Ray Wise, James Remar, Michael Ironside, Rebecca Romijn, and Hugh Jackman just for a scene or two, and these brief appearances of actors you know helps to make FIRST CLASS feel warm and comfortable. Watching the movie is akin to drinking an Old Fashioned or a High Ball, some old school drink that makes you feel warm and pleasant.

Ostensibly, FIRST CLASS is a film about the early relationship between Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender), and birth of the X-Men, but it’s really the overall tone and style that I find the most appealing. Each scene sparkles on multiple levels; seeing Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) and Emma Frost (January Jones) interact works because of the actors, the characters, and the style. Members of the Hellfire Club, Shaw and Frost appear a powerful duo, but then every so often Shaw will do something like order Frost to get him ice for his drink to reinforce who’s really in charge of the Club, which reinforces that we’re in the early ’60s, where this kind of accepted sexism isn’t unusual. When a perturbed Frost nonetheless goes and gets Shaw his ice without complaint, it carries a strong cultural resonance into the film, sending a ripple outwards to remind you of where and when this film is taking place.

Kevin Bacon is surprisingly great as Sebastian Shaw. I like Bacon as an actor, but I never would have thought he could give a performance as Sebastian Shaw that would stand alongside Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, Alfred Molina’s Dr. Octopus, or Heath Ledger’s Joker. Yet that’s what Bacon achieves here; it’s not a role that calls for the fireworks of Ledger’s performance, but Bacon completely embodies Shaw, a rather laid-back, supremely confident villain who approaches the world with the assured calm of one who takes it as fact that he is better than everyone else, and still completely enjoys the chaos he creates. None of the performances here are overblown, but Bacon’s performance provides the experienced calm that balances with Xavier and Lensherr’s youthful exuberance.

James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender are both very good, too, though I do feel their relationship was underdeveloped. FIRST CLASS doesn’t really put their varying philosophies to the test; by this, I mean that we do not see them develop as much as we see them playing chess with their already established positions. Right from the start, Charles wants to work with the humans while Erik wants to separate himself from them. There is a bit of development on Erik’s end, as he has to work out his revenge against the Nazi scientist who killed his mother and experimented on him (the scientist was Sebastian Shaw, under a different name) and then find himself in Charles’ world, but there’s never any real tension as to where Erik is going to end up, and not just because we know these two men will end up in opposition to one another.

McAvoy plays Charles as good guy, but also as a smooth, swinging bachelor. He uses the same line repeatedly to pick up women, and is a bit narcissistic when it comes to his hair, but when CIA agent Moira MacTaggart (Rose Byrne) arrives to bring him in on her investigation into Shaw and the Hellfire Club, Charles immediately signs up.

He brings Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) along with him. In this X-Men cinematic universe, Charles discovers Raven when they are children. Raven transformed herself into an image of Charles’ mother in order to raid the kitchen for food. Instead of being mad or angry, Charles is enthused about finding another mutant and invites Raven to stay with them.

That Raven grows up as Charles’ friend and chooses Erik’s side is supposed to be the main emotional arc of the film, but it really doesn’t work for me. Raven simply isn’t given enough screen time for this change to have any kind of power to it. For this to have worked, I think Raven needed to be seen as an equal to Charles and Erik (in terms of her place in the narrative) and this just isn’t the case. Raven is often in the near background of a scene and we’re supposed to draw a lot of what she’s going through based on secondary action. I think FIRST CLASS would have been better if Raven was clearly positioned as the third point on a triangle between Charles and Erik, and that we saw their actions through her eyes, because without this, Raven doesn’t wholly work as a character for me. This isn’t Lawrence’s fault, as she’s quite good, but rather a fault of the way the film has been assembled.

Working as a secret organization inside the CIA, Charles and Erik assemble a team of mutants to train under them. The most enjoyable sequence of the film is the recruitment process, as we see them in quick flashes making their pitch to a number of mutants, culminating in their visit to recruit Logan (Hugh Jackman). Erik and Charles approach the hard-drinking, cigar-smoking mutant at a bar, and have the following exchange:

“I’m Erik Lensherr.”

“Charles Xavier.”

“Go f*ck yourself.”

And out the bar our two stars go. It’s a great scene, and combined with Rebecca Romijn’s brief appearance later on in the movie, a nice link to the Singer movies. (And yes, this revelation that Raven grew up in Charles’ house begs the question as to why there wasn’t more emotional resonance between them in the Singer trilogy, especially when Raven is de-powered in LAST STAND, but that will eventually be just another strike against Brett Ratner’s disappointing conclusion to what Singer had started.) By the time of FIRST CLASS’ production, Marvel was already dropping its characters from one film into other films to create a sense of a shared universe, and it was a nice surprise to see Jackman and Romijn show up here to provide an X-equivalent.

Charles and Erik end up with a team that includes Raven, Hank McCoy/Beast (Nicholas Hoult), Angel (Zoe Kravitz), Havok (Lucas Till), Banshee (Caleb Landry Jones), and Darwin (Edi Gathegi). There’s little reason to complain about getting a “first team” that doesn’t include the classic organization of Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Iceman, and Angel because of how the X-Men universe has been assembled on screen. You are welcome to complain about it, of course, but I’m happier to have this movie tie into the other films than to be a simple reproduction of the comics that would have negated the earlier X-films. What is worth complaining about is that in the cinematic version of a comic book franchise that has long been a bastion of diversity and coded in such a way that kids of all races, religions, gender, sexual orientation, etc. could identify with the X-Men, yet it’s the two non-whites who get jettisoned, as Angel joins up with Shaw’s forces and Darwin is killed trying to stop Shaw.

That’s a small (but serious) complaint in an otherwise excellent movie. I’m probably going to re-watch FIRST CLASS as much as any superhero movie short of Avengers, as it’s a movie that just works from start to finish. The pacing is fact, the acting is good, the story (which ties in the Cuban Missile Crisis) is solid, and the style is simply superb. It’s not as good as Avengers, and it doesn’t contain characters I like as much as the Avengers-related or Spider-Man films, but X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is exciting, engaging, and utterly fantastic film making.

PROMETHEUS: Ridley Scott’s Hobbit: There and Forward Again

Prometheus (2012) – Directed by Ridley Scott – Starring Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Idris Elba, Logan Marshall-Green, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, and Patrick Wilson.

If you’re coming to this site for the first time, you need to be made aware of something right now: SPOILERS are coming. Lots and lots of SPOILERS. This isn’t one of those reviews that talks about the film in generic terms, this is a detailed reaction to the movie and I’m not going to limit myself. I’m telling you right up front that SPOILERS are coming, so don’t read on if you don’t want the movie spoiled. Go watch the movie and then come back.

I’m also not here to tell you why you’re wrong for disagreeing with me. I’m here to tell you what I think about movies, nothing more, and I’d love to hear what you think about the film, too. I’m sorely tempted to pull an Avengers and write up reactions to all the principal characters because with this reaction clocking in around 2,400 words, there’s still way more I want to talk about. I simply don’t have the time to do it this time around, but I love that this movie makes me want to write about it.

That’s that. We clear? Right, then, let’s do this.

In case you watched any of the trailers for PROMETHEUS and thought trailers were always an accurate representation of the film it was selling, here’s what PROMETHEUS is not: it’s not ALIEN, it’s not a horror movie, and it’s not a summer blockbuster. It’s really not even a Ridley Scott movie as much as it is a movie about Ridley Scott movies. While Scott is still going strong, at age 74 it’s a safe bet that he’s closer to the end of his career than the beginning, so perhaps it’s not surprising that he’s turned in his most philosophical take on the subjects of life and death.

But since he’s still Ridley Scott, it is equally unsurprising that PROMETHEUS’ answer to these big, important, existentialist questions is that their significance comes from being the fuel that drives humanity on its journey, and not in being answered. PROMETHEUS strikes me as Ridley Scott’s Hobbit, serving as a prequel not just to ALIEN, but to his entire cinematic career. The questions and themes that return again and again in his films are present here, and so PROMETHEUS is contradictory, being both a prequel and a capstone, as if Scott has decided to make a movie in which he attempts to figure out, or coalesce, what he was doing in all of his other movies into this singular film.

And what does he find when he looks back on everything? He finds that it’s much more important to keep pushing forward than to look back, and that questions about where we come from are less important than questions about where we’re going. Life – the actual act of living – is, to Scott, something to be embraced. Questions fuel life, and we are defined not by the destination, not by the answer, but by the journey and the search.

PROMETHEUS is a fantastic movie that does not tell a fantastic story. Ultimately, the most truthful pre-release tease about what PROMETHEUS is came from Scott himself, who said that this film would contain the “strands of ALIEN’s DNA” but explore its own questions, and that’s exactly what it does. That the result is less successful than ALIEN should not come as a huge surprise, since 98% of all movies made don’t measure up to ALIEN. PROMETHEUS fails to live up to ALIEN because the narrative is often clunky and a good many characters are defined more by their appearance than their personalities. I don’t understand why an expedition into deep space would have such a poor screening process that two of its scientists would freak out and bail the second things get weird other than the fact that the story needs to have two scientists freak out and bail the second things gets weird so they can be the first sacrificial lambs to the film’s monsters.

In Dana Stevens’ review of the movie over at Slate, she writes: “Co-scripted by Damon Lindelof of Lost, this film shares that series’ love for nested mythologies and involute philosophical riddles. Prometheus is more interested in piling on big questions than in answering them.” Ms. Stevens is not impressed, lamenting, “Prometheus could have been an elegant, moody sci-fi actioner if only it didn’t strain so hard (especially in the final scenes) for weighty existential meaning. [...] As Prometheus’ characters wrestle with these slippery abstract questions, the concrete and immediate ones raised by the story itself go unanswered. What were the motives of our marble-skinned forebears in creating us, given that they now seem bent on destroying us? And what are David’s motives as he commits acts that seem intended to sabotage the ship’s mission? To judge by a closing teaser that links this movie’s rapidly mutating beasts to the multi-mouthed xenomorphs of Alien, we’ll have to wait until the next installment in the franchise to find out. After all the strenuous philosophizing that came before, the ending’s floppy irresolution feels less like a sophisticated embrace of ambiguity than like a profound cosmic cop-out.”

I’m not picking on Ms. Stevens, nor am I interested in pointing out why she’s wrong, because she’s turned in a well-written review, and other than one instance where she uses the “you” formulation that mistakes her experience for a universal experience, I really only disagree with her conclusions rather than her individual points.

I like PROMETHEUS. I like it quite a bit, though I can certainly understand why people do not like the film. In regards to Ms. Stevens, I simply don’t share her frustrations about the film refusing to answer many of the questions it raises, and I don’t feel like the film is straining for weighty existential meaning at all. The characters in the film struggle with these questions but I don’t think Scott, or the man he chose to re-work the original script he was given, LOST’s Damon Lindelof, struggle with them. I should point out here that I was one of the seeming few who absolutely loved the final episode of LOST, as well, and PROMETHEUS, as Ms. Stevens points out, shares a good deal with LOST’s overall structure of raising questions and building mysteries that it refuses to answer. Like LOST, PROMETHEUS ultimately decides that after building a mystery, resolving the mystery is less important than offering an emotional resolution. If life makes you lemons, Scott and Lindelof are interested in making lemonade, while Stevens is interested in finding out where the lemons came from – neither side is wrong, but I don’t think PROMETHEUS would have been a better film if we did get those answers. Learning why the Engineers did what they did would have provided an interesting answer, but it’s not an answer that defines the film’s characters, and PROMETHEUS is far more interested in examining how the characters react to questions than in answering the actual questions.

I can certainly understand how frustrating this is, and I certainly would not like all stories to be constructed in this manner, but I also have some love for movies that step outside of the box and that refuse to play it straight. And PROMETHEUS does offer answers – it’s just not the answers that its characters forward as being the most important. They’re here to learn about the great mysteries of the universe, but Scott and Lindelof are here to learn about them. And what they find is coded right in plain sight when Janek (Idris Elba) sings a little ditty after getting the invite back to Vickers’ quarters: “If you can’t be … with the one you love … love the one you’re with.”

In other words, embrace the challenges of the moment you’re in. Don’t let your long term desires interfere with the life that’s happening around you.

In 2089, on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) discovers a star map while on a dig with her partner Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green). It’s the same star map found across the globe on multiple archaeological finds from civilizations that had no contact with one another. Their find catches the attention of Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce, in some atrociously bag old person make-up), and he funds a trip to the stars so they can find the so-called “Engineers,” whom they hope to find alive.

We’ve got a cast full of people with different goals: Shaw wants to find answers, Holloway wants to find the Engineers alive, Vickers (Charlize Theron) is the corporate agent who lurks in the background, Janek (Idris Elba) is the captain of the ship who is interested in keeping people safe and getting in Vickers’ pants, David (Michael Fassbender), a robot with mysterious, somewhat contradictory actions, and everyone else, who can be grouped under the title of Cannon Fodder.

PROMETHEUS would have benefited a bit from ALIEN’s technique with characterization, where the characters were simply but clearly drawn. Here, characters are a bit more slippery and it’s to the film’s disadvantage. PROMETHEUS is constantly creating doubt as to David and Vickers’ motives, and it throws in odd bumps in the characterization. After getting to LV-223 and discovering a man-made structure which contains dead Engineers and then returning to the ship in a storm, Holloway decides to play the grumpy drunk because the Engineers weren’t alive, and then be a dick to David because …

I dunno. It’s like his manhood is challenged by David’s very existence, so he’s always looking to make little digs at the robot. It’s hardly like David is all that sympathetic, either, because he comes back with one of the oozing metal cylinders and doesn’t tell anyone about it. Then he drugs David’s drink with a bit of the ooze that ends up infecting David, which, in turn, infects/impregnates Shaw after she and David have sex, which leads to Shaw having to enter a surgery tube (I forget the fancy name) where she has to cut out the fast growing alien fetus inside of her.

There’s a question with David about how much of what he’s doing is because he’s a programmed robot and how much is him expanding and potentially jumping his programming. While the crew is in stasis, he’s busy learning about them and simply acquiring knowledge. He likes to play basketball and watch Lawrence of Arabia, and when they reach LV-223, it’s David who has to wake the rest of the crew up.

The biggest narrative failure in PROMETHEUS is that the film doesn’t do a better job setting up David and Shaw as rivals. By combining David, Shaw, Vickers, Janek, and Holloway together in a chaos cloud from which David and Shaw emerge, it muddles the narrative focus. I think the movie would have been better off more clearly making David and Shaw the opposing signposts around which everything revolves, with the other characters filling the grey space between these two black and white positions, because that’s where the movie ultimately ends up, and if you’re going to raise questions that you don’t answer, I think you need to make a point to lock down the emotional conflict, and PROMETHEUS doesn’t do this as strongly as it needs to for me.

Where PROMETHEUS shines is as a spectacle; this is a gorgeously shot movie, whether it’s the ship’s interior or the exterior’s of Earth, space, and LV-223. There’s lots of great little visual touches, with the very-cool red survey “pups” and the blue survey suits working best.

Plus, there’s all the connections to ALIEN, which are not over-sold, but in clear evidence: the Engineer’s space ship, the interior design of Prometheus, the Alien-like creatures, and the H.R. Giger-esque designs that touch nearly everything on LV-223. And in the final scene, the Cthulhu creature shoves its tentacle down the Engineer’s throat and out pops what is clearly the first Alien that we recognize as “our” Alien.

There’s a whole handful of excellent action spectacles, from an Engineer’s initial appearance on Earth to the silica-based storm on LV-223 to the surgery sequence to the Prometheus taking out the Engineers’ ship to the Engineer vs. Cthulu-spawn final battle, but the real signature moment comes when David is on the bridge of the Engineer’s ship and activates the star map. I love scenes like this, where people are walking around inside of massive, 3D maps, and the visual effects team on PROMETHEUS nails it. David figures out that this Engineer ship was headed for Earth when the tragedy happened that cut it short.

What’s that tragedy? The Aliens took them out. Now, these aren’t the Aliens we come to know and love but a prior generation that are clearly modeled on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu more than Giger’s Alien, especially as it grows larger. The role of the Engineers and the Aliens are two of the questions that PROMETHEUS refuses to answer. The film indicates the Engineers did, in fact, build humanity because there’s a DNA match between the two species, and also indicates that the Engineers turned on their creation and were headed to Earth to wipe humanity out. This idea is enforced when the one, last surviving Engineer is awoken and starts killing people. (Which brings up another muddled plot point – Peter Weyland has been kept in deep freeze this while movie and then awoken to go see the Engineers. He’s hoping they grant him immortality, but instead they kill him almost instantly, meaning his whole appearance in space was kind of a pointless dud.) Why did the Engineers create humanity and then want to destroy it? Were the Aliens created by the Engineers to infest the Earth? The film refuses to answer and it doesn’t really bother me all that much because it works as a commentary on faith and how, in the end, whether one chooses to believe in God or disbelieve in God, we’ve yet to get an answer to the question of His existence. What’s important isn’t that we get an answer, but that we keep searching.

I know I’m in the minority on this, but not getting an answer doesn’t really bother me because I’m far more interested in what the characters do with the not knowing than I am bothered with not getting an answer. Both Shaw and David – the woman of religious faith and the atheistic robot – make it out of the film alive and they choose to work together to get off LV-223 and go exploring through space.

The key question that PROMETHEUS poses for itself is David’s, “How far are you willing to go to learn the truth?” All other questions and mysteries are secondary to this concept – what are you willing to do and how far are you willing to go to get the answers you want? Holloway was devastated when he thought there were no Engineers (and thus he dies a physical death that matches his psychological death), but Shaw and David kept pushing forward, and the film ends not with an answer to why the Engineers built humanity or why they then decided to wipe humanity out, but with Shaw and David staying on the hunt.

For me, it’s a powerful resolution, as the true believer and the atheist come together to continue the search for their answers. PROMETHEUS is ultimately about humanity’s never-ending quest for knowledge, and it’s fitting that its two survivors are those who were most interested in acquiring as much knowledge as possible. While it’s a difficult film with a muddled narrative, it’s also an exciting film for me to watch and think about. I can’t wait to see it again.

And therein lies the rub: In Tolkien’s Hobbit, Bilbo’s memoir is entitled There and Back Again, but for Ridley Scott, there is no going back again because a return home signifies an end to the journey, and Scott is too unsettled for tidy endings. The only real finality in his signature films (Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator) comes through death, and those who make it to the end of Scott’s films are typically unsettled survivors – they may have made it to the credits, but the experience they’ve undergone has altered their worldview in such a way that they cannot mentally go home again even if they can physically go home again.

There and back again? No. There and forward again.

HAYWIRE: You Shouldn’t Think of Her As Being a Woman

Haywire (2011) – Directed by Steven Soderbergh – Starring Gina Carano, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas, and Michael Douglas.

“You shouldn’t think of her as being a woman. No, that would be a mistake.”

This is the line Kenneth (Ewan McGregor) says to hitman Paul (Michael Fassbender) when he’s trying to convince Paul to take the job to assassinate Mallory Kane (Gina Carano). “I’ve never done a woman before,” Paul had said to him, and this is Kenneth’s final pitch to get him to sign on.

It’s a problematic statement, of course, but it gets to the heart of the problem with HAYWIRE: What do we make of both Mallory Kane and the woman who plays her, Gina Carano? For Kenneth, the statement is both completely true and absolutely false. He completely thinks of Mallory as a woman because he used to be romantically involved with her, but he also absolutely thinks of her as an employee instead of a woman, and her decision to leave his employment will kill his business as she takes many of his clients with her. It’s a perfect storm of personal and professional debasement for Kenneth, and he’s looking to make Mallory pay for this by setting her up to take the fall for the death of a journalist. (The plot is needlessly convoluted, but we’ll get to that.)

This personal/professional divide haunts the Mallory Kane character throughout HAYWIRE because Soderbergh is willing to embrace her professionalism but not her personal feelings and desires. She is clearly at the top of the covert op game. Coblenz (Michael Douglas), a U.S. government official, insists that she be part of an operation he hires Kenneth’s private firm to complete, which tells us how highly she’s thought of, and why Kenneth is so upset that she’s about to bail on him. She’s the meal ticket.

Coblenz is the only purely professional relationship in the film. He represents that far end of the spectrum and her father (Bill Paxton) represents the far end of the personal section. In the middle we have ex-boyfriend Kenneth, who’s completely ensconced in both worlds, Aaron (Channing Tatum), who’s a professional associate that she hooks up with after a job, and Paul, who should be a professional-only contact, but their mission sees them playing a married couple, so it’s like Soderbergh wants to keep up this illusion of her as a part of a couple.

And that brings us to Soderbergh and Carano, and what makes me uneasy about HAYWIRE. The whole film comes out a bit creepy. Instead of coming off as the strong, sexy woman she is in real life, Carano feels a bit fetishized in HAYWIRE by Soderbergh. It just feels … off-putting to me that in a movie where Carano plays this top flight covert op, Soderbergh can’t get away from the fact that she’s a woman, too. She’s constantly wearing outfits that accentuate her sexiness, and while that is, by no means, a bad thing, it also feels like we’re supposed to be surprised when this incredibly sexy woman is also incredibly capable of kicking ass.

Which is silly because we’ve all been watching beautiful women kick ass for years, so why does it come off like Soderbergh is the one who finds this surprising?

In the Blu-Ray’s special features, Soderbergh talks about how he first became aware of Carano when he was watching MMA on CBS (he seemed very focused on the CBS thing, for some reason) and decided someone should build a movie around her. HAYWIRE is the result, but the film offers no more depth than you’d get from watching Carano fight on MMA. (On CBS, or otherwise.) It’s that back and forth between Carano being gorgeous and Carano kicking ass that emphasizes her physicality that bothers me because there’s no emotional counterweight. She even worries about having to play the gorgeous woman with Paul because she’s “not comfortable playing the dress,” which she means as not being comfortable playing the sidekick but comes across literally as her not being comfortable in a dress.

The structure of the film opens with Mallory fighting Aaron in a diner in upstate New York, and then semi-kidnapping a guy (he doesn’t seem to be complaining too much, perhaps because she’s a woman he tried to help when she was fighting with Aaron), who she then decides to tell her story to, because she wants someone to know her story so the truth can, at some level, get out. We get this whole, over-complex plot that’s told largely in flashback, but even though the story is thus told from Mallory’s perspective, she’s largely an empty shell of a character. She comes off as a professional, someone who’s more interested in their job than in the personal, which is fine, but since so much of the film is about how other people emote onto her, it would be nice to get a little something on how she emotes back. Or, if she doesn’t emote back fully, if there was a bit more about how she struggles to emote back, because she just seems to mirror Kenneth and Aaron’s emotional states back to them.

The best scene of the film is when Mallory is killing people in her dad’s house and her father sees her in action down a darkened hallway. Paxton’s face is a mix of emotions; even though he knows what his daughter does, he’s never seen her in action and now he’s watching her in a hand-to-hand, fight to the death battle.

As an actress, Carano is limited, but that’s not surprising given that this is her first film. She’s not bad by any stretch, but HAYWIRE doesn’t ask her to talk a whole lot, which adds to that sense that she’s simply an object for us to watch. Not knowing a whole lot about her, I had a feeling the fight scenes would be good because of her MMA background (and they are brutally fantastic), but even though I’d seen he before, I was a bit take aback at how amazing she looks on film. In some scenes she looks a bit like Rachel Weisz and in others she’s definitely giving off an Asia Argento vibe, but in all scenes she’s Gina Carrano, and the camera simply adores her.

I’m left feeling like Soderbergh let Carano down here, which is a silly and stupid thing to say since she’s only here because of him, but I feel like HAWYWIRE is simply a movie with more style than substance. Because it’s a Soderbergh film he can get Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Channing Tatum, Bill Paxton, and Paul Fassbender to show up for small roles, but this adds to the fact that none of these characters really feel all that real. They’re ideas, they’re types, but they’re not people.

The script also lets the film down by an overly complex infodump at the end of the film that tries to do the whole, “you thought this guy was the bad guy but this guy is the good guy, and vice versa” bits that’s just not necessary.

Stylistically, then, I’m a fan of HAWYWIRE (the movie has a slick look, and David Holmes’ score is phenomenal), but if you told me right now that I can only watch Carano’s next film or Soderbergh’s next film, I’d pick Carano’s. Soderbergh should deliver something more than a beautiful surface and he doesn’t. On the other hand, Carano has the on-screen presence to have a career in the film business. While her speaking parts are the weakest aspect of her performance in HAYWIRE, the special features segment on her dedication to training, and the glowing way everyone (trainers and fellow actors) talked about her willingness to learn, and take and apply criticism, speaks well of her chances of improving.