I saw Haywire a couple of days ago.

Spoilers.

I reckon I spent the first hour and fifteen minutes of this film thinking I was hating it. Then, in the last fifteen minutes, it turned everything around. Of course that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s suddenly an amazing film, but I think it definitely makes a difference to what I would think if I was to see it again.

Firstly, Gina Carano was brilliant as Mallory, the betrayed ‘contractor’ on the run from her previous business associates. The role really played to her strengths, avoiding the tendency to make physically strong female characters either unrealistically powerful in their punches or sexually alluring to every male character in the film. She delivered the dialogue effectively and gives an immediate impression of a no-nonsense character: something which the film frequently centres on. The whole cast is good, I should say. It has a remarkable number of big names for what felt like a relatively low-budget film.

There were good points and bad points about the audio, I thought. I loved the diegetic sounds of the fights, creating a real sense of brutality and realism in the combat. Most films like this relish in combat, but here you’re hearing the sounds of punches crushing into people, people being thrown into hard brick walls and other furniture, the frantic scrambling for life as someone gains the upper hand, and it makes the violence as easy to abhor in the film as it is in reality. There were a few iffy sound effects where I wasn’t entirely convinced, and these, annoyingly, immediately eject the audience from the diegesis, but it’s easy to re-emerge. The most annoying point about the sound was the hideous mismatching of soundtrack. It has some sort of strange jazz infusion orchestra playing in the background of scenes, particularly during scene transitions. It draws far too much attention, seems to hold little relevance, and harks back to dodgy late 20th century spy dramas like Charlie’s Angels and the Bionic Woman, and it’s almost impossible to stop yourself expecting a slow-motion run across a field or something equally nostalgic.

The directing worked well, especially because of how deeply this film is rooted in reality. There’s something almost homely about seeing a chase through an urban jungle and rather than the usual nondescript shop fronts and housing blocks, Mallory runs through recognisable stores (HMV if I remember correctly). It consistently and repeatedly reasserts itself as being set in reality, the same way that 28 Days Later does when Cillian Murphy asks if they’ve got any Fanta in the shop. There’s something that makes the experience all the more real and all the more brutal when seeing it in your world, rather than one you can easily detach from.

The awkward framing device which, luckily, only runs for the first fourty-five minutes or so (Mallory explaining the story so far to the man whose car she’s ‘borrowed’) is irritating in how basic it is. I don’t really think it needed one. Plenty of films start in medias res and nobody seems to mind. It could have that opening scene and then just cut back to the beginning without the need for any device or function character to trigger the story.

The rest of its story was remarkably original though, considering it’s such well-trodden ground. It was kind of like the narrative of Salt (starring Angelina Jolie) with the character of Bourne (starring Matt Damon). I quite liked it. It wasn’t outstanding, but not every film has to be. I would definitely see it again, even if just to see how my perception of the first half of the film changes now I know how it ends and how the situation comes to be. That being said, I may mute the sections with the jazz.

Absolutely in awe of Charlize Theron’s performance in Monster. Absolutely breathtaking. Probably one of the greatest I’ve ever seen. Wow.

I saw Brick for the first time yesterday. Took me a while to decide if I liked it or not because the hardboiled detective story was transformed almost too masterfully into the film’s diegesis. I spent the whole film waiting to see flaws and didn’t find them!

Kathy Bates genuinely scares me ever since I saw Misery.

I’m currently spending time avoiding writing an essay about dreamcraft and visions, so thought it would be apt to post a shot from The Lovely Bones. This film is probably my favourite representation of dream and the dreamworld on screen.

Chigurh in No Country For Old Men is such a complex, scary, creepy character. Genius on the screen.

I just got back from seeing We Need To Talk About Kevin.

I’ve always absolutely loved Tilda Swinton, and here I think she gave another Oscar-worthy performance. I felt every moment of her emotions, really desperately wanting to help her. She flawlessly transitions from the hope-filled mother of an innocent newborn, to the depressed mother of a murderous psychopath. There’s something about her that’s just enchanting to watch. So genuine and brutal in her performance. She definitely deserves awards.

A friend criticised the film as being too ‘artsy’ before I’d seen it, so I was expecting to agree with him. Actually, I really liked the style of its directing. The narrative intertwines and flicks back and forth along the timeline, linking it through juxtaposition and dichotomising of emotion and sensation. It compliments Swinton’s performance, adds to the disaster and hopelessness of the film, and makes it, at times, incredibly difficult viewing.

I don’t really have any criticisms of it. There are a couple of things I would have done differently, and some of the sequences were, I thought, a little bit pretentious and unnecessary, but the outstanding quality of the film as a whole means I can easily overlook them as just not being quite to my taste.

It’s always difficult to construct a film around delicate subject matter - in this case, a school massacre - without risking generating some sort of sympathy for the killer. Here, it’s managed with such poise and delicacy that all your emotions end up conflicting over Swinton’s character, seeing Kevin as more of an offshoot of her broken psyche than a character to be adored or abhorred in his own right.

Overall, I’d recommend it to all film-lovers. Some people might be put off by its artsy qualities. Others probably will struggle to engage with its staggered narrative. I, however, loved it: a really engaging, devastating and captivating film experience.