Haywire

In director Steven Soderbergh’s stilted new thriller, MMA poster gal and obvious non-actor Gina Carano stars as a double-crossed covert operative flitting between mutedly lethal international incidents. The various worms in her can include Michael Angarano, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, Ewan McGregor, Bill Paxton and Channing Tatum. Carano looks hot and tough and attentively costumed, but her fights seem stagey and awkward, perhaps because she’s not used to faking them. Her director meanwhile treats suspense as a product of boredom and the benefit of audience doubt, with his penchant for crisp, slender screen titles not really mitigating his other penchant for murky digital photography. What’s worse is the shrug-worthy script by Lem Dobbs, who also wrote Soderbergh’s The Limey. Unable or unwilling to make us care about its dribbled bits of blasé badass backstory, and only barely enlivened by David Holmes’ diggable fusion-groove score, Haywire feels vacant, a conference call of phoning it in. J.K.