Haywire: Learnin' the tropes

Haywire reunites director Steven Soderbergh with screenwriter Lem Dobbs. Though not as revelatory or formally engaged as The Limey, the pair’s 1999 sleeper, which marked a comeback for its star, Terrence Stamp, Haywire is nevertheless, like The Limey, a smart, playful vamp on old tropes: lone wolf hired muscle takes a gig that turns out to be a double-cross; she becomes a loose end; corrupt former employer now seeks to eliminate her... you know the tune. Like The Limey, Haywire is also a film unusually concerned with geographical coherence, thus we get chase scenes that work up quite a sweat ensuring that we understand exactly how we got onto the fourth floor of this particular building or down that particular alleyway—there’s even a pair of demonstrative scenes in which our heroine, Mallory Kane (Gina Carano), carefully consults a covert GPS device. Soderbergh, as always, operating as his own cinematographer, knows that one of the problems with modern action flicks is that they’re disorienting in all the wrong ways. In a film that’s all about escape, pursuit, concealment and ambush, identification is dependent on knowing where the hell we are.

That sense of where-we-are also applies to genre, and Soderbergh, though always looking for a novel twist, has a knack for letting us know just what kind of movie we’re watching: a thriller, in this case, with the emphasis on thrills, but a thriller that doesn’t insult your intelligence. While the sequences involving operations or surveillance play out in cool but propulsive montages set to David Holmes’ lightly funkified suspense score—part In a Silent Way/Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis, part Shaft, part post-rock—the actual fight scenes are relatively light on cuts, feature no music whatsoever, and look pretty painful in their awkwardness. Random objects are creatively appropriated as weapons. Furniture does not always break, and such little insertions of realism add a pleasing layer of ouchiness. Yet other details, such as the tumbleweed that tumbles by during a final scene between Mallory and her new employer (Michael Douglas), allude to a certain detached sense of irreverence guiding this project.

Soderbergh has attracted his customary diverse range of acting talent, mostly recognizable stars with a little something extra to catch us off guard: Antonio Banderas with a beard, Ewan McGregor with a bad haircut (and a half-assed accent), Bill Paxton as a moustached military-fiction-writing dad. Everyone seems to be having the right amount of fun. As for the tough, terse, well-built, largely expression-free Carano, well, lets just say she’s a mixed martial arts star first and actor second. I confess that I caught myself wondering now and then whether Asia Argento was too busy. Or Michelle Rodriguez. But Carano’s gung ho/no bullshit attitude, her obvious ability to do at least some of her own stunts and her lack of over-psychologizing function fairly well in what is above all a movie meant to move, to function, to divert. “You shouldn’t think of her as a woman,” says the baddie who betrayed her. “That would be a mistake.” Indeed, Mallory is a firecracker, a killing machine with a moral compass. I guess she has feelings too. Maybe we’ll get to explore them in the sequel.

Already dead: The Hit

The mystery at the heart of The Killers—whether we refer to the version starring Burt Lancaster (1946) or the radically reconfigured too-violent-for-TV version with Lee Marvin (64)—concerns a marked man’s resignation to death. What would make an ostensibly vital young man accept his executioners without a fight? Why wouldn’t he run when he knows they’re coming to snuff out his life? The special genius of the 1964 version is that, good to its title, it’s actually about the killers, allowing them to ponder openly the psychological state of the person they’ve disposed of—something hired killers aren’t supposed to do. Half the point of hiring a killer is to place murder in the hands of someone with no personal investment in the victim. But the movies have been telling us over and over that killing’s rarely so simple a task, and killers, for all their repugnancy, can feel strangely close to us. They can help us sort through big questions that stories about far noble people have a harder time addressing.

British director Stephen Frears’ The Hit (84), written by Peter Prince, returns to the muddy existential stream of The Killers, though it’s not directly related to either previous film or to the Ernest Hemingway story upon which those films were very loosely based. It follows London mobster-turned-supergrass Willie Parker (Terrence Stamp) from his testifying against his cronies in court to his idyllic life in hiding in Spain, a life that, ten years after his betrayal, is about to end. He’s abducted by a thin, funereal figure in a pale suit named Braddock (John Hurt) and a flamboyantly unseasoned thug of an apprentice named Myron (Tim Roth). They are to drive Willie over the border to Paris where they’ll finish the job in the presence of their employer. But what begins to eat at the voluble Myron, and perhaps even at the stoic Braddock, is how detached Parker seems about the whole thing. He’s positively serene, explaining, with a shrug and a smile, that dying’s no big deal. “It’s as natural as breathing.” Why isn’t he nervous, groveling, wriggling away? He must have something up his sleeve.

As with The Killers, there’ll come a point in The Hit where the nature of this resignation will be exposed. Well, kind of. Unlike the victims in The Killers, Willie’s interior logic doesn’t seem to be dictated by frustrated romance or unconscious desires for suicide. What’s especially interesting is how The Hit, which may very well not have been written with The Killers in mind at all, seems to have learned a little something from both Killers. It initially has us identify with Willie, who may be a dirty snitch, but whose desire to escape the London underworld for the Costa del sol is hardly tough to relate to. He’s also handsome, charming, and utterly watchable. Which is to say he’s Terrence Stamp, who would bring a similar flair to a not dissimilar character many years later in The Limey (99), which itself appropriated images of Stamp playing yet another sympathetic criminal in Poor Cow (67).

But then something deliciously odd happens, something the classicists say you’re not to do. The Hit switches protagonists, gradually abandoning Willie in favour of Braddock, the least forthcoming guy in the movie, a man whose true identity is so elusive that the final words spoken are questions put to him about which of many men he might actually be. Hurt is at his most fascinatingly blank. He doesn’t answer. And this blurring of identities, along with the burrowing into a new life while shedding the old one, along with the Spanish landscape and the beautiful young woman along for the ride (Laura del Sol), recalls yet another movie about unspoken desperation and the complicated assimilation of roles and duties: Antonioni’s The Passenger (75). So besides helping us to rediscover a forgotten gem of 1980s British cinema, a movie that’s smart, artful, strange, often gorgeous and entertaining enough to recommend to just about anyone, not to say brilliantly acted, Criterion’s new DVD release is also a fascinating little piece in a larger cinematic lineage, pointing both backward and forward toward a number of history’s more interesting movies that deal with the psychic geometries of death, assassination, secrets, and surrender.

Among Criterion’s typically superb special features, there’s a terrific essay by Graham Fuller and an audio commentary that finds Frears, Prince, Hurt, Roth and editor Mick Audsley recalling in relaxed, accessible language the thrill of moving into features after years in British television, the challenges of making a road movie in a foreign country with very little money, and how awesome is Spanish legend Fernando Rey, who plays a key supporting role. I especially appreciated Roth’s personal musings on the diversity of performance styles on display. The Hit was one of Roth’s first major roles, and, while watching a shot that features he, Hurt and Stamp seated together in the car, he draws our attention to how elegantly distinct acting sensibilities can harmonize, all of them playfully rubbing up against one another for the camera to simply soak up. All in all, a treat.