Haywire



Mallory Kane (Gina Carano), a Private Military Contractor who does wetwork for the CIA, is betrayed by her employer after a hostage rescue mission in Barcelona. She must then set out to find out why she was betrayed and take revenge on everyone involved.

Carano is a former MMA fighter with a 7-1 win-loss record, primarily in Elite eXtreme Cagefighting. Her background makes her a natural choice for the ass-kicking, hardcase Mallory. Her star-studded supporting cast includes Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, and Bill Paxton as her father.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh in his realistic mode, the film was well-received by critics but critically panned by general cinema-goers. It's a spare, fast-moving action movie with no extra fat, realistic explosions and gunplay, and brutally convincing fight scenes, Carano excelling at her own stunts. However, it has also been criticized for a barely-coherent plot, failure to wrap up several loose ends and some unnecessarily long, silent shots of doorways and such.

Contains examples of:


 * Action Girl: Mallory Kane, naturally.
 * Anachronic Order
 * Badass Bystander: In the diner fight, a male bystander wrestles Aaron away from Mallory, and seconds later the waitress smashes a coffee pot over Aaron's head.
 * Combat Pragmatist: Everyone. Aaron opens the diner fight by throwing hot coffee in Mallory's face and instantly follows that with a ketchup bottle to the head, and the rest of the fights are similar. The hotel-room fight begins when
 * Combat Stilettos: Refreshingly averted, (along with Action Dress Rip, Stripperific and other similar tropes) Mallorie takes off her high heels right before going into the hotel room, knowing that.
 * Conspicuous CG: The deer.
 * Development Hell: The film was originally set to open around Christmas 2010 but reshoots and a distributor change (from Lionsgate to Relativity) delayed it more than a year. In the process, Steven Soderbergh shot Contagion and it beat this film to theatres by four months.
 * Diabolus Ex Machina: Don't worry, she's escaped the cops with clever drivi
 * Executive Meddling: The original cut of the film was more brutal and had most of the fight scenes be of the Curb Stomp Battle kind. Reshoots (done a year and a half after the original shoot) made those scenes more even-handed. Also, Gina Carano's voice was dubbed in the final cut.
 * Fauxreigner:  pretends to be.
 * Gas Mask Mooks: The Garda Síochána Emergency Response Unit. They aren't actually villains per se - just police officers who have been wrongly informed Mallory is a murderer - but they perform this role and the Faceless Goons rule is definitely in effect. When faced with unmasked cops later in the film Mallory
 * Hollywood Silencer: Averted. Mallory uses a pillow in front of the muzzle when she shoots  but it doesn't make the shot any quieter. It may have been simply to avoid blood/brain splatters.
 * Idiot Ball: Kenneth simply does not let go. You'd expect a man in his profession to know a little more than he apparently does when it comes to, say, how to kill a single woman in an exposed cop car in the middle of nowhere, or whether it's a good idea to, or even how to.
 * Also, when he finds out that Mallory is in the house- which she grew up in- with him and his team, he orders them to search for her. Results in a Mook Horror Show.
 * Improvised Weapon: Hot coffee, a ketchup bottle, a fork, the coffee pot...and that's in the first fight. It's about what you'd expect, given the entire cast being Combat Pragmatists.
 * Impressive Pyrotechnics: Averted. The few explosions in the film are all small amounts of C4 that detonate with the true-to-life dull boom and a cloud of concrete dust.
 * In Dublin's Fair City: The setting for most of the film.
 * Karma Houdini:
 * Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: The hotel room fight scene.
 * Large Ham: Among skillfully understated performances, Antonio Banderas stands out with his true-to-form overdramatic Spanish accent. This is by no means a bad thing.
 * Mook Horror Show: The fight in Mallory's house. The lights are off, she grew up here, and the villains split up. Too Dumb to Live.
 * Oh Shit:
 * Pretty Little Headshots:.
 * Sequel Hook: Malory is offered to work directly for the US Government in exchange for information from Michael Douglas' character.
 * Quieter Than Silence: You will become painfully aware of what footsteps and clinking cups sound like watching this film.
 * Trash the Set: The hotel-room fight manages to break just about everything in the room exept the sofa. Which still gets knocked over.
 * Would Hit a Girl: Everyone. Justified, since she's completly capable of beating them up in return