Gina Carano

In the diner at the start of Haywire (2011), Gina Carano's Mallory Kane is asked by a colleague to come quietly. She declines, and Steven Soderbergh lets us see why she might expect to get away with it. Carano moves like someone accustomed to being hit and unafraid of the prospect. Her background in professional mixed martial arts makes the physical confidence convincing. It is shrewd casting in a thriller we like most when it gets on with the fighting.

Soderbergh shoots and edits the film himself, keeping the camera far enough back to show Carano doing the work. He lets the shots run rather than cutting around each blow. We winced at the impacts in Haywire, because the unscored fights leave us with the sound of bodies hitting furniture. David Holmes's bass and brushed drums accompany the travelling and the talk, then stop when the fighting begins. That makes Carano's ability to carry a fight without the usual distractions especially valuable.

The roles that followed largely kept her in action settings. She played Riley Hicks in Fast & Furious 6 (2013), then Angel Dust in Deadpool (2016), a film we recommend chiefly for Ryan Reynolds and Morena Baccarin. Cara Dune in The Mandalorian followed, a role she played during 2019–2020. These are sensible parts for someone who can make a fight convincing, though they give us little reason to expect a different sort of performance.

The difficulty in Haywire is her flat line delivery, which gives us little to care about between confrontations. Soderbergh limits her dialogue and uses the camera to supply anger or fear, working with Lem Dobbs's spare script. Bill Paxton, playing her father, provides warmth that is otherwise missing. We need not ask an action lead to explain every feeling, but a little more expression would help when nobody is throwing a punch. Start with Haywire, provided the fighting matters more to you than the conversation.