Haywire

Gina Carano stars as Mallory Kane in this covert operations thriller. Take my conspiracy addled mind, add a stack of John LeCarre novels consumed over the last year and the whole story is totally believable. All except for the part where the girl manages to beat half a dozen big strong men to death. Well, it's a movie, and she uses a gun on some of them, and her character is very talented at martial arts.

The best part is her serious demeanor. No nonsense about her at all. It was very hard to find a picture with a serious expression though. This is the best I could do. Most of her pictures she's smiling, as you would expect a good looking actress to do.

The action was really well done, though there is one chase sequence where I think she probably should have ditched the hat. I suspect the fashionistas in costuming persuaded her to keep it.

There is one scene where she is sitting in the back of the cop car with her hands cuffed behind her back. The cops are outside doing some dumb cop stuff. She uses this opportunity to slide her cuffed hands underneath her and then under her legs until her hands are in front of her. I wondered if this would be possible. I expect to see a lot more of this in cop movies, kind of like the holding-the-gun-sideways-to-shoot nonsense that appeared a few years ago and spread like wildfire.

Steven Soderberg directed. The name sounded familiar and when I checked I found a bunch of his movies that I had seen and liked.

2011 Haywire
2007 Ocean's Thirteen
2006 The Good German
2004 Ocean's Twelve
2002 Solaris
2001 Ocean's Eleven
2000 Traffic
2000 Erin Brockovich
1999 The Limey
1998 Out of Sight

I think I saw Ocean's Thirteen. I know I saw 11 & 12, but they all kind of run together after a while.

Update June 2020. Here is another post I did about this movie.