Dir. Steven Soderbergh
Score: 5.6
Steven Soderbergh, who seems to threaten retirement after every new film he makes, must be getting bored. Tired of shooting glossy, A-list capers like the Ocean’s series, and weary of making big-deal ensemble dramas like Contagion, Soderbergh gets a rush from trying odd combinations of things just to see what might happen. Like a small boy bored of his toys and mashing them all together into some other kind of contraption, Soderbergh fuses together elements of avant-garde techniques, non-professional actors, non-lineal storytelling, digital film, whatever seems to tickle his fancy at a given time. That many of these experiments might be considered failures is entirely beside the point: It’s his way of staying interested in the form.
Which brings us to his latest madcap mishmash: He takes a pretty standard-issue international double-crossed assassin storyline, adds a bunch of high-ranking Hollywood males to go along with a breathless whirlwind of international locations, and then utilizes a non-professional actress, known previously for her work in MMA cage matches as his heroine, and shoots the whole thing on lo-fi digital media so that at times it looks like a Mexican soap opera, replete with awkward hand-to-hand combat scenes that are unlike any you’ve seen before, but not in the way you might think. When we first meet the heroine in question, the esteemed agent-for-hire Mallory Kane (Gina Carano), she’s already on the lamb from her former boss and lover, Kenneth, played by Ewan McGregor (one of curious affectations of the film is all the male characters are identified solely by their first names), who has betrayed her for unknown reasons shortly after completing a successful extraction in Barcelona. As a target for Kenneth and his multitude of shady connections, Mallory has worked her way back into the U.S. after a near-miss in Dublin, by another one of Kenneth’s men, Paul (Michael Fassbender). Along the way, she has to contend with Aaron (Channing Tatum), another agent hot on her trail, and try to track down the mysterious circumstances of her double-crossing.
For all her lack of cinematic experience, Carano certainly doesn’t lack for physical ability; in fact, her purposeful physicality roots the character in a kind of verisimilitude that you won’t find from the smugly sleek Angelina Jolie-types who usually populate these kinds of affairs. Her acting, while not professional, is reasonable, though you get the sense her range would be on the limited side. Where the film truly gets weird is with the bread-and-butter scenes for a typical action fest: the fights. Beat down after beat down, Mallory puts the wood on her myriad of male attackers, crushing them between her thighs, choking them out under her bulging biceps or getting repeatedly kicked in the head, but the scenes have a curious, choppy quality to them which Soderbergh seems to relish. The choreography is herky-jerk and stagey; the movements broad and unfocussed, like watching two six-year-olds pretend to karate chop one another. The narrative, which gets lopped from one timeline to the next (Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs have never met a jumbled structure they didn’t like), rushes us all over the country and Europe, but almost never stays in one place long enough for the scenes to separate themselves. Short of the house of Mallory’s father (Bill Paxton), whose stunning New Mexico abode is straight out of “Architectural Digest,” the film never wants us to get terribly comfortable with where we’re setting.
Marketed as a straight-up piece of boom-boom, I suspect the action/adventure crowd won’t really know what to make of this curious amalgamation, but as scores of A-list male actors go down to the furious fists and feet of this super-agent, there’s at least a decent possibility they won’t much care.
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