‘I didn’t have any issue [doing] this fight scene with a woman, because I was the underdog,’ Ewan McGregor tells MTV News. By Kara Warner Gina Carano in “Haywire” Photo: Claudette Barius / Five Continents Imports If you like your movies with a lot of action, kick-ass fight sequences and actors who do their own stunts, look no further than this week’s new thriller “Haywire” to satisfy those needs. The concept for the film was born after director Steven Soderbergh saw footage of MMA fighter Gina Carano in the cage, which inspired the Oscar winner to build a film around her. “Haywire” revolves around a black-ops supersoldier (Carano) who seeks the ultimate revenge after she is betrayed by her colleagues, played by the very capable Ewan McGregor, Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender, Antonio Banderas and Michael Douglas. MTV News recently caught up with Carano, Tatum and McGregor to discuss the very realistic fight sequences and how the guys were more than game for getting their butts kicked by a woman. “The physicality, that was fun to me. I didn’t have to hurt anybody,” Carano said of the difference between the film’s choreographed fights versus her MMA matches. “I didn’t have to worry about getting choked out, and there were no egos with any of the actors. They all wanted to do all their own stunts, and a lot of people around me were like, ‘Gina, that’s not normal. You’ve got some beautiful people to work with and a beautiful first experience.’ ” “To be totally honest, she’s better than every guy I’ve ever fought, really, other than one, and he was a strike force fighter as well,” Tatum admitted of his co-star, with whom he shares an intense bone-breaking exchange during the first five minutes of the film. “I can say this without any amount of trying to say it for the movie: I challenge anyone to come and fight her or even move with her. She’s by far the best athlete I’ve ever gotten a chance to move with. She’s so strong and in control, it’s just ridiculously unprecedented in my opinion.” McGregor added that he didn’t even think about the man-vs.-woman factor, only that it was the most appropriate scenario for his manipulative, weasel-like character. “There was a slight difference in our fight scene together. For me, I didn’t ever have any issue with the fact that I was having to do this fight scene with a woman, because I was the underdog,” he said. “There was no question that I was going to get killed if I didn’t manage to get away.” Check out everything we’ve got on “Haywire.” For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com .
South Korea’s 2012 contender for a foreign language Oscar feels more like a war movie than a movie about the Korean war, right up until its pitilessly bleak final frames. Though the American presence in that war is peripheral to its story, Hollywood clichés pervade The Front Line , from its slate and sepia tones to its stock company of characters and dialogue that translates macho posturing into present-day slang. And yet the movie has its startling moments, moments with the spark of specificity and the bitter clarity of perspective. Those stabs of the unexpected culminate in an ending that refuses to raise even the mildest or most melancholy flag of redemption. Is it worse for history to downplay a war as pivotal as this one or for the culture to overlook it entirely? Roughly based on true events, the film gives a grunt’s eye view of a conflict that some feel has been forgotten in popular retellings of the 20th century, despite the efforts of Don Draper and co. Perhaps this under-representation drove director Jang Hun to go for broke in telling the story of the end of the Korean civil war in 1953. The genre poaching begins with the flimsy hook of a mole investigation: An officer named Kang Eun-Pyo (Shin Ha-Kyun) is sent to the front to explore the apparent assassination of the famed Alligator Company’s commander. There he finds a group of men poised on the border of insanity, and among them an old friend name Kim Soo-Hyuk (Ko Soo). Since Kang last saw him Kim has been transformed from a frightened naïf into a soulless killer — the ruthless soldier who’s too cool to die, too hot to live. A rivalry seethes between the two friends about who has seen the worst of the war. Through their philosophical divide — for Kang there are only orders, for Kim there is nothing left to obey — the film explores the worth of a single life in a balance too steep for anyone to bear. Hun takes pains to emphasize the futility of the war; again and again the men ask why they are fighting. That question might seem a little curious to anyone who has paid even the most fragmented attention to the plight of North Korea over the last sixty years. Every inch withheld from Kim Il Sung and his heirs is an inch free from despotic rule and decades of mass starvation. But The Front Line focuses on the muddled, desperate view from the ground, and the absurdist terms on which war is actually fought. The bulk of the film is set in the Aerok Hills, mountainous territory on the embattled Eastern border. North and South exchange possession of one particular hill so many times that they begin leaving notes and gifts for each other in a bunkered cubbyhole. Hun is careful not to demonize the North Korean fighters, spreading the stereotypes out evenly: The Reds get the grizzled leader with the bitchin’ facial scar and the legendary sniper who turns out to be a foxy woman. The battle scenes, like most shot in the wake of Saving Private Ryan , feel derivative when they’re not quoting that film directly. A sequence recounting a frenzied insurrection during a failed amphibious landing is horrific on its own terms, however, as is the depiction of an overwhelming assault led by the Chinese. But The Front Line , at almost two and a half hours, develops its own case of battle fatigue. By the time the “one last job” trope is deployed in the wake of an armistice, the point has been made bloodily and well that war is same everywhere — appalling — and everyone sounds the same screaming for their mother. We don’t know what they’re fighting for any better than they do, and the dialogue is too thick with treacle for archetype to clarify into character. What ultimately makes the film compelling is the extent to which it uses the shared language of cinema to telegraph the caustic feelings of a people toward their own history. The Front Line was a smash in South Korea, which is more remarkable given the absolute nihilism of its finale. What secrets lay in that response? Are they just tougher than we are, with clearer memories? Was it not worth it, after all? Though the movie’s coda is not enough to lift the film out of its genre-bound shackles, in finally rejecting formula it feels defiant in more ways than one. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The brilliant haute spy character Modesty Blaise — created by British author Peter O’Donnell in 1963 and kept alive, through 2002, in a series of comic books and novels – has been botched on film so many times that those of us who love her have mostly given up hope. Joseph Losey first missed the target with the 1966 Modesty Blaise ; Scott Spiegel took another wobbly shot with the 2004 direct-to-video My Name Is Modesty: A Modesty Blaise Adventure . But the spirit of Modesty lives, by another name and in a different sort of story, in Stephen Soderbergh’s stylish, quietly exhilarating Haywire , which features mixed martial-arts star Gina Carano as a hit person with a smoldering, deadpan gaze and nutcracker thighs. She also, as it happens, looks killer in a cocktail dress. Carano’s character in Haywire is a shadowy freelance special-ops agent and ex-Marine named Mallory. She has the requisite action-novelist father (played by Bill Paxton), who’s half protective mother-hen, half proud papa. And somehow, as we learn in the early moments of this decidedly nonlinear picture, she has reason to be wary of the behind-the-scenes string-pullers who employ her – they’re played by Ewan McGregor (sporting a silly-wonderful Beaker haircut), Antonio Banderas (in an equally silly mountain-man beard) and Michael Douglas (in his normal Gordon Gekko ’do, which is silly enough by itself). When we first meet Mallory, she’s striding into a sleepy eatery in upstate New York. A gently charismatic maybe-thug, played by Channing Tatum, has followed her there – why? Even after an instance of classic diner violence a la Quentin Tarantino, we still don’t know, but boy, do we want to find out. Later, Mallory will dress as a sultry trophy wife and tryst, in a manner of speaking, in a Dublin hotel room with a suave-as-usual Michael Fassbender. And somewhere in between, she barks orders to Michael Angarano, as a mild-mannered citizen who comes under her spell: “You’re going to fix my arm while I drive, OK, Scott?” He hears and he obeys. It’s hard to say whether Haywire moves fast or at a pace as languorous as a cat’s stretch. It’s probably somewhere in between, and although the story begins somewhere near the end and encompasses about a half-dozen middles, the sequence of the plot details is almost beside the point. The script is by Lem Dobbs, also the writer behind what is, for my money, Soderbergh’s finest picture (and another nonlinear tall tale), The Limey . Haywire doesn’t have that picture’s chilly elegance, but then, it’s not trying for that effect. This is Soderbergh’s version of a ’60s spy caper – even the music, by David Holmes, channels the purring, ocelot sleekness of old Honey West episodes — and it’s driven by a kind of bossy energy, embodied largely by Carano. Her mighty haunches ought to get their own screen credit. Because this is the best kind of action film: One in which we’re actually granted the pleasure of watching bodies move . Haywire is low on gaudy explosions, which have become the ho-hum fallback position of most action movies – as the fireworks have gotten bigger, louder and more elaborate, they’ve come to mean almost nothing. And although there is a car crash of sorts in Haywire , it’s a wincingly amusing one that’s ingenious in its simplicity. When Soderbergh does action, less is more. He’s more interested in watching Carano, and he’s betting we will be, too: Her muscles are obviously mighty, yet they have the softness of feminine curves – Mallory is a mixed-message heroine for sure, which is part of what makes her compelling. (And the guy actors here all deserve credit for so gamely bowing to her mercy.) That Carano does all her own stunts, of course, only adds to the allure. Watching a woman being hurled against a flat-screen TV might not ordinarily be my idea of fun, but it’s clear Carano can take it, and land on her feet – like all of the violence in Haywire, the moment is brutal and laced with grim humor. In advance, I’m dismayed by the suspicion that a lot of people will come out of Haywire thinking Carano “can’t really act,” though her performance is a useful catalyst for thinking about all the qualities of doing and being that acting – whatever the hell it really is – can encompass. The character of Mallory isn’t as starkly and distinctly drawn as she would be if she’d actually been modeled on Modesty Blaise – Mallory’s personality is elusive and indistinct by design, while O’Donnell had very clear ideas about who Modesty was, where she came from, and what her values were. But Carano gives us just enough, I think, without giving the whole game away. Her Mallory, a brunette bombshell, is as cool as an oyster on ice. At one point she receives Ewan McGregor’s character in the apartment she’s recently moved into. The flat is in disarray, and she’s just come out of the shower: He hair is wet, and she’s wearing a kimono robe knotted tightly around her waist, which just makes everything above and below look that much rounder . Mallory is all woman, though she eyes McGregor’s character as if she’s considering eating him for breakfast — and, in fact, a sly bit of dialogue suggests that she already has. Elsewhere in the picture, McGregor warns another man, “You shouldn’t think of her as being a woman. That would be a mistake.” Yes and no. We’re plenty used to seeing ass-kicking heroines in the movies, from Angelina Jolie in Salt to the feisty schoolgirls of Sucker Punch to Kate Beckinsale’s Underworld latex babe. But Carano’s Mallory is something else again: Paradoxically, she’s both more purposeful and more casual than any of those action heroines – she’s never guilty of trying too hard, even when she’s got a man stuck between a rock and a hard place. That she makes it all look so effortless is part of the fun – as long as you’re not unlucky enough to be the guy with his nut in the nutcracker. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
MMA star Gina Carano makes her action heroine debut this month in Steven Soderbergh ‘s spy revenge pic Haywire , which bone-crunched its way into moviegoer hearts during AFI Fest . Can’t wait to see Carano put a beat down on just about every leading man (Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender) whose path she crosses? Submit a 10-word review of any Soderbergh film to enter to win a pair of tickets to Thursday’s Los Angeles premiere. Your faithful Movieline editors will select the 10-word review that moves, tickles, or pummels us the most, in true Haywire fashion. The best part? The premiere ticket prize includes entry to the after party, where you can worship Carano in person. Just, y’know. Keep your distance. The rules for Movieline’s Haywire premiere giveaway: – Submit a 10-word review of any Soderbergh movie in the comments below. Entries must be exactly 10 words, no more, no less! – Enter with your full name and an email address where you may be reached. – Eligible entrants must be at least 18 years of age and able to attend the premiere in Los Angeles on Thursday, January 5 at 7:30pm. One (1) winner will be selected and notified the morning of Thursday, January 5. Tickets must be picked up at will call at the Los Angeles premiere and are not transferable. Contest ends Thursday, January 5 at 9 a.m. PT/12 p.m. ET. — so get to reviewing!
Gina Carano made like Joe Montana in grade school. She was the girl who tossed the pigskin around better than the boys, left ’em scattered and battered around the playground face down in their underage egos, dishing out bruises like badges of honor.
SAN JOSE, Calif. – Cris (Cyborg) Santos knocked out Gina (Conviction) Carano with less than a second left in the first round to capture the vacant 145-pound women’s championship at the Strikeforce MMA card Saturday night.
