It’s a Sunday night. The excitement in the air is palpable as we gather in the pub for a pre-movie drink. Adam did a run through of the list of worst movies ever seen by the SMEX group which was fitting since the last movie I saw with SMEX over a year ago was Skyline, that rated ‘highly’ in that infamous list of stinkfest productions. We had a new member join us this week (rik) and having all had a beer at the pub, we were on our merry way to the kino.

Adam tried to assure me that this film would be better than Skyline. Adam doesn’t (knowingly) lie about such important things and it turns out his wily instincts were on form.

The film opened with a man beating the daylight out of a woman for no apparent reason. The rest of the movie we’re slowly fed parts of the story that have led up to bringing about this situation. The leading lady Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) is a government security contractor tasked with a hostage extraction of a Chinese journalist. Mission completed, becomes clear that her superiors are driven by money and greed rather than by any moral or ethical sense of duty to their country. Mallory has unwittingly landed in the middle of a scheme to sell the hostage to the highest bidder and when she discovers this the group becomes intent on cleaning up the evidence of its involvement in the hostage extraction making Mallory a prime target in their retribution.

With seemingly everyone now trying to kill her, she sets out to take down everyone involved in the scandal. The action is fast at times. We were treated to a rather cold-blooded killing from the heroine of the movie which caught everyone (me?) by surprise and the movie keeps you guessing the whole way through. Mostly you’re just trying to keep up with what’s going on most of the time as you enter the brutal, paranoid world of covert operations.

The film really is what you would expect from a Steven Soderbergh production really: a clever, fast-paced storyline with good action scenes and a good cast of characters. The stand-out of the movie was Gina Carano and we should probably be expecting good things from her in the future. Haywire was an enjoyable 1 1/2 hours at the movies to wind down the weekend. The psychological cinema-going scars created by Skyline may finally be on the mend.