Haywire is an action-thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh (Contagion, Ocean’s Eleven) which stars Gina Carano, an MMA star and newcomer to the acting game. Carano plays Mallory Kane, a trained op who works for a government security contractor. After a job that almost goes off the rails, she is double crossed by her own people and becomes a target chased by skilled assassins. The film boasts plenty of hot male star power in Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton, and Michael Douglas.

The trailer to this movie didn’t do anything for me and I went into this movie thinking I would get a couple of nice fight scenes out of it and possibly get surprised by Soderbergh. But such was not the case. This movie was just a straight up action movie. Now I’m not such a snob that I don’t love a straight up action movie but I just didn’t like this one. There was barely any plot or dialogue and when there was some dialogue it was pretty bad. You would then think well if that wasn’t there then the fight scenes must have been amazing? WRONG. I mean there were some good ones (the one at the beginning of the film with Channing Tatum is a little brutal but good as well as the scene with Fassbender) but overall not that great.

The entire movie is pretty much a showcase of Carano’s MMA skills. I’m not an MMA fan, well at least I’ve never given it much thought, so maybe if I was I would have enjoyed it more. For whatever reason the critics have been loving this movie more than audiences. It currently has an 80% rating from critics versus 44% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. The only thing that even remotely saved this movie from being a complete disaster for me is the variety of eye candy spanning from the young (Tatum, Fassbender) to the older (Banderas, McGregor, Douglas).