Soderbergh Marathon: Part 25

Intro

Haywire (2011)
We're reaching the endgame folks.  I have just one more movie after this one and I can officially say I have seen every Steven Soderbergh movie.  I can now say I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of him as a filmmaker.  He has three modes to simplify it more than I should: he has his mainstream movies, his experimenting with technology movies, and his genre movies.

Haywire tackles a genre Soderbergh has not yet tackled, and unless the next and last movie I cover is a vastly different movie than I expect, it remains his only movie.  This is Soderbergh's action movie.  I've also seen it called a martial arts movie, which may or may not be true, but if you told me that beforehand, I'd feel like I was misled.

Haywire combines the Lem Dobbs-Soderbergh collaboration for the third time.  Weirdly, the movies are separated by 20 years and if the trend holds, we can expect a fourth collaboration around 2021.  Dobbs has solo writing credit on all three films, and all three oddly enough are pretty damn reliant on the director.  Kafka is completely stylized, The Limey's appeal is basically its editing, and of course Haywire is an action movie, so the action is the appeal, not the dialogue or even the story.

The main function of an action movie is to entertain with action scenes and not let the rest of the movie fuck that up.  Most action movies fail to even deliver on that first part, much less come up with a competent story.   Haywire does however deliver on the action elements.

Soderbergh would make a good action director if he decided to go in that direction.  He films most of the action scenes at a farther distance than most action directors do, so that you can see every punch and kick land.  There's no shaky cam, no 10 cuts for every 5 seconds here.  And he was able to do this because the film's star, Gina Carano, was an MMA star.

About Carano, she will not blow you away as an actress.  But she does what's needed.  She was well-cast, because the character she plays doesn't really require much range, but she does require someone who can convincingly kick ass.  And she convincingly kicks ass!  This is one of those movies where every punch, kick, you can hear and feel.  They seem brutal.  Like I said, Soderbergh could do this any time he wants to if he wanted to, which I doubt.

As far as the second part of a good action movie, the rest of the movie does not fuck up.  It holds together.  It would certainly not stand under scrutiny, but I had no problems following the movie's plot as the movie happened.  And it's hard to tell if the dialogue is specifically good, because well every other part in this movie is like an A-list actor.

Yeah the supporting cast in this movie is insane.  Like ridiculously overqualified.  You have Channing Tatum, Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas, and Michael Fassbender playing what amount to bit parts.  Well McGregor's is a bit more prominent, but he lurks in the shadows most of the movie, so even he doesn't get a lot of screentime.  You also have a young Michael Angarano and Bill Paxton to round out the cast, and while both of them I would picture in a movie like this even without Soderbergh's involvement, they just add to the acting talent.

All in all, Haywire gives you what you came for and that's really the most important element of an action movie.  You hire Carano to do what she does best - beat people up - and make it look like she's actually beating people up, and you have a successful movie.

3/4 stars

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

I am not a comic book fan.  It's one of those properties I'd probably enjoy, but I didn't grow up with them and there's no way I'll ever start.  I have too many movies to watch, too much television, and too many books to read.  Comic books are a distant thought to me.  Comic book movies, on the other hand, I have seen.  I'm tired of them, but I have seen more than a few of them.  Of the X-Men franchise, the only movie I haven't seen is The Wolverine.  (Apparently this movie contradicts that movie.)

I'm not sure I have many thoughts on this movie.  I enjoyed it a lot.  The special effects were breathtaking.  The stakes were the end of the world, which is becoming increasingly common and thus increasingly dull.  However, the movie made sure to keep the conflict personal.  The time travel aspect, also weirdly an increasingly common trope to rejuvenate franchises, isn't too confusing.  People who have a tendency to overthink time travel will probably find fault with it and I'm usually one of those people, but it never took me out of the movie while I was watching it.

I'm not sure how the X-Men comics are, but in the movies it's ultimately about the tragedy of Erik Lehnsherr and Charles Xavier's doomed friendship.  And because the actors playing them have been Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan - and now James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender - it's nearly always effective.  I particularly liked how in the present, you see Erik saying how he wished he could have had a few years back being enemies with Xavier while in the past, he's unwittingly creating the future that will doom him.  That's the surprising part about this movie.  Magneto is, at least in my opinion, the most sympathetic character and one who breaks your heart.

If I have a problem with the movie, it's probably with Jennifer Lawrence's Raven, or Mystique.  Despite moving the plot of the movie along, I felt she was underserved as a character.  I was less affected by her internal struggle than I should have been, because it mostly felt like it was just a plot machination to me.  I can see a future where she goes on a rampage and wants to kill the people who want to see her dead, but I don't think this reboot version had gotten her to that point yet.  As presented in First Class, that's Magneto's thing, not Mystique's yet.  The movie skipped over the part where she makes the "heel turn" in my opinion.  And then at the end she sort of out of nowhere becomes a good guy.  It's not really out of nowhere, but I don't know I didn't think it would happen at that point.

I also thought the ending was a little too pat and probably makes this movie suffer at least a little bit on rewatch.  So none of the somewhat shockingly painful deaths for all the mutants mattered.  It never even technically happened.  (Those deaths.... damn is all I can say.  Apparently saying fuck is more harmful than watching that.)

3/4 stars