After the jump, burly MMA sex symbol (probably the only time I’ll ever mean that as a compliment) Gina Carano does her best Jason Statham impression in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire, in the role of ass-kicking rogue government operative that would normally go to someone like The Stath (frickin’ Title IX). I don’t know about you, but to me it feels like Steven Soderbergh, somewhere along the line, between no one wanting to watch his two-part, four-hour movie about Ché Guevara, The Informant! being a disappointment at the box office (full disclosure: I thought it was great), and Sony pulling the plug on Moneyball a few days before filming (so that they could make the mind-numbingly conventional version they eventually made), Soderbergh decided, “You know what? Screw it. You don’t want me to try to do something unconventional? Fine. I’m gonna make the glorified B-movies everyone else makes and do a remake of Outbreak where Gwyneth Paltrow gets a graphic autopsy. Then I’m gonna shoot one of those dumb, chick-on-the-run movies, just so I can blow stuff up and watch Gina Carano’s boobs bounce while she triangles people. And you know what? It’s still gonna be better than Salt.”
(at this point I imagine him doing that “suck it” thing with his forearms over his crotch)
Yes, it looks like a direct-to-DVD action movie, and it’s coming out in late January, traditional studio dumping ground for stinkers, and holy God, I can’t believe that voice over isn’t a joke. But I saw about ten minutes of it at Comic-Con, and I must admit, I was impressed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a total B-movie, and Gina Carano manages to make C-Tates look like a good actor by comparison, as hard as that is to believe, but it seems like a movie that at least knows what it is. Namely, fight porn. And it looked like good fight porn. No quick cuts, no shaky cam, just good old-fashioned bone-breaking and brutality. With vaguely sexual overtones, as any film where Gina Carano triangle chokes Michael F. Assbender would be. (“How YOU doin.. *passes out*)
With Gina Carano, I like to imagine all sex would involve at least some light submission wrestling. With Fassbender, no sex, but maybe we could just take our shirts off, get sweaty and go cup to cup. You know, like bros do.