'Pina' and the need to keep dancing

Director Win Wenders' Oscar-nominated documentary captures the ferocity in a choreographer's work.

To the uninitiated (that would be me), Pina Bausch, the German choreographer who died in 2009, seems like a true original. Her dancers varied in body types and ages, and she concentrated as much on the movements of hands as she did on footwork. Movements in many of her pieces can have the look of body-contorting spasms that occur with machine-like repetition. Pina evidently eschewed the grace and beauty of traditional dance, preferring to find vigor in a dramatic farrago of play, wit, conflict and menace.

Director Wim Wenders' Pina, a documentary tribute to the choreographer and those who dance in her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, highlights the work of individual dancers, as well as of Pina’s entire company.

Selecting samples from four pieces by Pina, Wenders presents the dances without explanation, although he does include snippets of interviews with dancers, presented in voiceovers that accompany silent close-ups of each speaker.

Wenders reportedly had been planning to make a film with Pina, who died before that project could be started. Wenders shot the subsequent film in 3-D, and Pina has been widely hailed (along with Martin Scorsese’s Hugo) as an example of 3-D used to artistic advantage rather than to generate cheap thrills or to boost ticket prices.

Many critics have argued that 3-D allowed Wenders to capture a feeling for the space through which the dancers moved. I’m in a distinct minority here, but I didn't think Wenders consistently used 3-D to great advantage. And little in Pina substitutes (what could?) for the shock of immediacy that goes with live performance.

Oddly, Wenders greatest technical contribution, or so it seems to me, involves the sense of intimacy fostered by sound. We hear dancers breathing. We hear the movement of feet on a stage. Because some of Pina’s work included moments without music, these sounds add to the sense of rawness that characterizes much of Pina’s work.

Some of the dancing (Mueller’s Cafe, for example) is done on stage; some of it takes place in industrial settings; some of it transpires on what appears to be the median strip of a busy roadway. These locations add to the novelty of Pina’s challenging works, and keep the film from feeling as if the dancers have been hermetically sealed inside an art bubble.

But even the stagey numbers are not without interest. In an early piece (Rite of Spring), the dancers move atop dirt that has been spread across the stage floor; in another (Vollmond), they splash through a great puddle of water on a stage or scamper over a huge faux rock.

None of the dances are seen in their entirety, but Pina enables us to come away with a strong sense of Pina’s work, as well as an appreciation for the fierce striving of an artist who tried to capture something vivid and transformational.

Pina evidently was the kind of director who gave instructions that left plenty of room for interpretation. At one point, for example, she advised a dancer to consider becoming a little crazier.

Far from being flip, Pina's exhortation serves as a significant statement from an artist who knew that it's sometimes necessary to push past the edge of madness before one can feel free enough to speak.

Ah, to be young and have superpowers

Chronicle goes a long way toward reinvigorating a genre.

Prior to a late-evening screening of Chronicle -- the uncustomary hour of 9 p.m. -- I checked for a rating on Rotten Tomatoes. No point heading for the multiplex at such an odd hour for a movie that promised to do nothing more than add to my already extensive file of big-screen disappointment.

But there was hope. Early reviews of Chronicle gave the movie a surprising 100 percent rating, meaning those who’d already been to screenings were blown away by another in the apparently endless series of “found-footage” movies that jump-started their way toward unwarranted popularity with The Blair Witch Project.

For the first half of Chronicle, I thought that those earlier reviewers had nailed it.

Chronicle tells the story of three high-school kids who descend into a mysterious cave, are radiated by a mysterious object and, as a result, find themselves in the possession of superpowers. The three kids develop their powers slowly, discovering them as they go along. They also react to their newfound abilities in believable ways; i.e., they play around, turn into pranksters and generally enjoy their enhanced abilities, which seem to derive from exercising enormous amounts of concentrated will. Our three protagonists are learning what they can do at the same pace as we are, and when the boys discover they can fly, the screen floods with giddy, airborne glee.

So who are these kids?

Matt (Alex Russell) is a decent young man with enough philosophical pretensions or maybe Wikipedia-acquired knowledge to quote Schopenhauer. Matt’s cousin Andrew (Dane DeHaan) is an outcast with a drunken, physically abusive father and a terminally ill mother. Steve (Michael B. Jordan) is a popular black kid who’s running for class president.

It’s refreshing that our heroes don’t become secret crime fighters or superheroes. No matter what happens, they continue to act like young people, although Matt becomes the first to realize that super powers bring super responsibilities. He seems to sense that the discouragement of a hard moral lesson looms.

Roughly midway through, director Josh Trank -- working from a script by Max Landis (son of director John Landis) -- switches tones. Andrew goes from scorned nerd to high-school heartthrob, but can’t stop overcompensating for years of torment at the hands of bullying classmates. Increasingly, he uses his powers in destructive ways that begin to divide the three buddies.

Now before I continue, a word about the movie’s principal technique. Andrew is running around with a video camera. He’s filming everything in the dizzying, hand-held style associated with this kind of movie. At a mid-picture rave, another camera-wielding character turns up. Monica (Ashley Hinshaw) is a video blogger whose testy relationship with Matt slowly deepens. This two-camera approach provides welcome expansion of the movie's visual vocabulary.

You can look Trank’s “found-footage” approach in two ways. We, of course, do live in a moment when even the most banal activities are likely to be recorded. And it’s hardly far-fetched to think that a kid such as Andrew, who has trouble relating to others, would put a camera between himself and his environment.

On the other hand, I’m tired of these hand-held exercises in faux amateurishness, and I wondered if I would have enjoyed Chronicle any less had it been shot without the found-footage gimmick.

As Andrew spirals further and further out of control, the Seattle-based story turns into another orgy of destruction.

I wish that the movie’s second half had been as imaginative as its first, but the story has to go somewhere as Matt realizes that he must do something to reign in Andrew's vengeful fury.

Still, Chronicle and its young cast deliver much more than you’d expect. For the most part, it's a smart, creative look at normal kids dealing with an abnormal situation. Don’t look for Chronicle to make a Blair Witch-like cultural splash, but as superpower movies go, it’s full of reinvigorating life.

It may not be groundbreaking -- but it's creepy

Daniel Radcliffe tries to shake Harry Potter in an eerie, if familiar, hunk of horror.

It’s always a bit puzzling when a character in a movie decides to spend a considerable amount of time in a house that we know is haunted. Such situations -- common enough in horror movies -- put the audience a couple of steps ahead of the characters and tend to turn horror films into predetermined rituals that deliver their shocks with time-table efficiency.

The Woman in Black -- a new hunk of horror based on a London stage play -- more or less fits into such a standard horror mold, but does a good enough job to merit attention. At its best, The Woman in Black -- set in the early part of the 20th century -- is plenty creepy.

Part of an attempt to revive a venerable name in British horror, Hammer Films, The Woman in Black also is notable as a starring vehicle for Daniel Radcliffe, known to most audiences as child wizard Harry Potter. In The Woman in Black, Radcliffe plays a young lawyer who’s sent to a dreary English village to organize the papers of a deceased woman. Radcliffe’s Arthur Kipps, is also a widower with a young son. He leaves the boy in the care of a nanny when he sets out to tackle his legal assignment.

Upon arrival in this bleak rural village, Kipps receives the cold shoulder from the townsfolk, who warn him not to go to the deceased woman’s home, a dilapidated mansion outside the town. The townsfolk, of course, have a point. Every time someone visits the rotting old manse, one of the town’s children meets with a gruesome end.

As it turns out, the mansion is the real star of the movie; it has been designed to push as many spook buttons as possible, replete with cobwebs, clutter and creepy-looking wind-up toys. As Kipps sorts through papers he finds in the mansion, he begins to sense movement around him. He sometimes catches a glimpse of a ghostly lady in black, who seems to dart around the periphery of the frame.

The core of the movie rests on fun-house effects and how Radcliffe responds to them. Alas, Watkins gets more mileage from the former than from the latter. You’d think that by now, Radcliffe would have mastered the art of reacting to special effects, but he goes through most of The Woman in Black without showing much personality.

He does, however, evince steady sprays of gleaming-eyed intensity, as well as a bit of stubble, perhaps to reassure us that his boy-wonder days are done.

The supporting players add old-pro polish. Ciaran Hinds plays Mr. Daily, one of the few locals who’s kind to Kipps. It turns out that Mrs. Daily (Janet McTeer) has gone round the bend as the result of the loss of her young son. Mrs. Daily treats her small dogs as replacement children. The twins, as she refers to them, eat in high chairs at the same table as the Dailys, an image that offers one of the movie's few humorous moments.

With a movie such as this, a lot depends on how all the creepy threads ultimately are pulled tight. The ending, which immerses poor Kipps in what looks like a ton of marsh mud, tends to be a bit overwrought, but stops short of ridiculousness, and the British countryside has been photographed by cinematographer Tim Maurice-Jones in forlorn fashion that speaks of an impenetrable loneliness. The light in the movie looks as cold as the underbelly of a dead cod.

If you think about it long enough, you’ll find some subtext here, but you may prefer (with no apologies necessary) to enjoy the movie’s encompassing atmosphere of dread, its ability to give you the chills and the effective way it doles out the kind of jolts that tend to shriek their way through moments of eerie silence.

A story of big whales and big media

It's good to save the whales, even if they're animatronic.

In 1988, three gray whales found themselves trapped under the ice off the coast of Alaska, namely the tiny, top-of-the-Earth town of Point Barrow. To further complicate matters, the whales' path to the ocean was blocked by an enormous ice ridge. Panicky and exhausted, the whales were forced to surface through a small hole in the ice that allowed them to breathe. As the temperatures dropped, it became increasingly clear that even this hole would freeze over, dooming the whales to death by suffocation.

Fortunately for the whales, their story -- to use the media argot -- blew up. Reporters from more than 26 networks made their way to Barrow to cover a nail-biting adventure that culminated with the arrival of a Soviet icebreaker that helped clear a path for two of the surviving whales.

Big Miracle, a movie about the 1988 efforts to save these whales, calls these sea mammals Fred, Wilma and Bamm-Bamm, a goofy homage to the Flintstones. I don't know if anyone really called the whales by those names, but Big Miracle uses traces of anthropomorphism -- as well as other ingratiating measures -- to make an already accessible story even more accessible. I'd call it wasted effort.

But let me not condemn a movie that's hell-bent on conveying the right message. In the washed-out world of family fare, Big Miracle qualifies as an entirely acceptable entertainment that's best when it derives its emotions from the whales -- a mama, papa and baby -- and less effective when it comes to the movie's humans, who engage in the kind of PG-rated interactions that are mostly unburdened by complication.

John Krasinski plays a TV newsman who's working on a series of features in Point Barrow when he learns about the stranded whales. His report eventually makes its way to the network. Environmentalist Rachel Kramer (Drew Barrymore) quickly joins the fray; she begins pressing for a major effort to save the whales. At one point, the whales are under threat of being "harvested" by the local Iñupiats, who have a long tradition of whale hunting.

The movie's additional cast includes Dermot Mulroney as a U.S. colonel who flies one of the helicopters that try to drag an oil-company owned icebreaker to the scene. He's being pressured by a presidential aide (Vinessa Shaw) who sees an opportunity to do some good while bolstering President Reagan's image with environmentalists.

Oil company executive J.W. McGraw (Ted Danson) also capitalizes on the opportunity to look beneficent. Initially resistant to a save-the-whales campaign, McGraw eventually catches the spirit of a project that at times seems as crazy as it is noble. Rescuers dig a series of holes in the ice so that the whales can breathe while moving toward open waters.

To add kid flavor, we're given the story of an enterprising and appealing Inupiat boy (Ahmaogak Sweeney) and his grandfather (John Pingayak), the figurehead who represents the ancestral ways of a people who mostly were ignored until the whale frenzy broke into the global conversation.

The script also hints at a possible love triangle. Kirsten Bell plays an aspiring TV reporter who's looking to make a name for herself. She catches Krasinski's eye, but he's still emotionally involved with Barrymore's character, a woman with whom he only recently ended a relationship.

Don't get the impression that Big Miracle has any sense of absurdity when it comes to the sight of an Inupiat elder chanting next to cameramen as they jockey for the best view of increasingly stressed whales. Director Ken Kwapis stays within general-audience parameters while giving the material a pre-teen tilt.

Some of what happens may upset younger kids, but Big Miracle tells its story in a way that's clearly designed to show that opposing forces can work together to accomplish ... well ... a big miracle, something that seemed especially noteworthy during the waning days of the Cold War.

One more thing: You'll see clips of Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and Peter Jennings reporting the whale story on the nightly news for their respective networks. They, too, I'm afraid, represent an increasingly endangered species, the network anchor. Got cable?

A gender-bending story set in the 1890s

How you react to Albert Nobbs, a project that Glenn Close reportedly spent two decades trying to bring to the screen, depends almost entirely on how you react to Close in the title role; she's playing a woman posing as a man in 19th Century Ireland. Close, who played the role on stage in the 1980s, brings the project to the screen under the direction of Rodrigo Garcia (Mother and Child and Nine Lives). As written by Close and John Banville and based on a novella (Celibate Lives) by George Moore, Albert Nobbs feels as meticulously crafted as Close's make-up. But here's the thing: I couldn't buy Close as a woman successfully passing as a man. Maybe it's her delicate facial features. Whatever the case, Nobbs looks like a strange version of Close, pinched into a constricted, almost neutered impression of a man. The screenplay tells us that Nobbs decided -- partly for economic reasons -- to pose as a man, but the movie also serves as commentary on how some people have responded to societies bound by rigid gender-role conventions. While working at a hotel, Nobbs meets Hubert Page, a house painter played by Janet McTeer, who brings robust conviction and humor to her role as another woman posing as a man. McTeer's Hubert essentially steals the picture from the deeply repressed and fussy Nobbs, who dreams of opening a tobacco shop. Hubert lives with a woman who loves and accepts him; he suggests that Nobbs also might be able to find some semblance of normal life. Nobbs then turns his attention to Helen (Mia Wasikowska), a co-worker at the hotel. There's genuine poignancy in watching Nobbs, a man of limited imagination, pursue a dream that we know is beyond his reach. At its best, Albert Nobbs stirs emotion, but I never entirely shook the distracting awareness that I was watching Close create an illusion that didn't quite convince.

*For the record, not everyone shares my view of Close's performance, certainly not the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who nominated her for a best-actress Oscar. The Academy does agree on McTeer, though. She was nominated in the best-supporting actress category.

Liam Neeson vs. wilderness and wolves

The Grey takes us deep into the Alaskan wild for a mixture of action and horror.

In the new movie The Grey, Liam Neeson dances with wolves that, for the most part, get the best of a band of grizzled oil rig workers who are stranded in the Alaskan wilderness after a harrowing plane crash.

I don’t know if Neeson is having trouble finding quality scripts or whether he enjoys making these kinds of movies, but he certainly gives action directors their money's worth by bringing instant gravitas to a genre that’s not always taken seriously.

In this case, Neeson – who also starred in Taken and Unknown -- has signed on for a movie that sets action and horror against an inhospitable and frozen landscape.

Once the surviving workers get their bearings, it becomes clear that they’ve quickly made the transition from gritty hard guys to potential wolf food. And it doesn’t take long for director Joe Carnahan, who directed Neeson in the A-Team, to show us the wolves, large, ferocious howlers that are naturally cunning and lacking in mercy, sort of like film critics.

Neeson’s John Ottway, an emotionally wounded man who’s charged with shooting wolves that threaten the oil workers, begins the movie at a forbidding-looking Alaskan drilling site. He's in such a distraught state that he even contemplates suicide.

Ottway obviously has known some other kind of life. He seems to have gone to Alaska in the same way that an earlier generation of movie characters joined the French Foreign Legion. I guess we’re meant to think that the plane crash forces Ottway into a last-ditch attempt at engagement.

The crew that tries to escape the crash scene with Ottway is appropriately motley. The men are differentiated from one another in mostly expected ways. Frank Grillo, for example, portrays an ex-con whose belligerence becomes his defining trait. He’s quick to challenge Ottway’s leadership, even though it’s clear that Ottway has plenty of wilderness savvy.

Obviously, many in this small band will die, and, as is often the case with such movies, you can amuse yourself by speculating about the order in which the unlucky will be picked apart by wolves. You also can brace for the film’s more “philosophical” moments, which play like so much dorm-discussion baloney.

Much is made of a poem (“Once More Into the Fray”) that Ottway says his father wrote. It’s the kind of poetry that could be appreciated only by someone who’s never read a good poem; sort of Jack London meets a Boy Scout handbook.

But if the movie has a message, you’ll find it in the poem: Grit your teeth and do battle with hostile nature.

Carnahan uses gauzy but obvious flashbacks to fill in a blank that doesn’t need filling; they explain why Ottway tends to be so damn morose.

Hey, I’m as frightened by an assortment (or so I've read) of real wolves, puppets and animatronics as the next guy. Some of the scenes in The Grey are rich with apprehension, and a few of the movie's twists even go against the grain of formula

Still, it would have taken a better-written movie to get me to leap whole-heartedly into this glum and frozen fray.

'Man on a Ledge' plunges into mediocrity

A convicted cop makes an unusual ... er ... totally improbable stab at proving his innocence.

If a movie puts a man who's threatening to take the big leap on a ledge some 200 feet above a New York City sidewalk, it’s reasonable to expect that some tension will follow.

In the prosaically titled thriller, Man on Ledge, director Asger Leth does create a bit of tension, but the movie that surrounds the title character is too painfully improbable to keep eyes from rolling.

Instead of the tightly focused picture its title suggests, Man on a Ledge turns out to be an unsatisfying mixture of vertiginous teases, heist-movie ploys and bad cop/good cop moralizing.

Sam Worthington, of Avatar fame, plays Nick Cassidy, the man on the ledge, a former New York City cop who was sent to prison for stealing a valuable diamond.

The screenplay by Pablo F. Fenjves quickly shows us how and why Cassidy wound up on the ledge, where he spends most of the picture.

I won’t burden you with a plot summary, except to say that Cassidy, his brother (Jamie Bell) and his brother’s girlfriend (Genesis Rodriguez) are involved in a preposterous scheme that’s supposed to prove Cassidy’s innocence.

If you’ve seen even a couple of movies, you’ll quickly be able to separate the bad guys from the good guys, but I’ll give you a rapid rundown of the supporting cast, which includes Elizabeth Banks (as the detective called to talk Cassidy off the ledge); Edward Burns (as a skeptical cop who doesn’t think Banks’ character is up to the job); and Anthony Mackie (as Cassidy’s former partner and purported best friend).

Special mention needs to be made of Ed Harris, who plays David Englander, the real-estate tycoon who owns the building where Cassidy stages his ledge stunt. Englander’s greed and insensitivity are so blatant, they stand out like an overly wide and aggressively garish tie. Getting a bad – i.e., caricatured -- performance from an actor as gifted as Harris takes some doing, but Leth manages it.

Other annoyances crop up: Bell and Rodriguez banter in ways that are neither funny nor believable, and the standard crowd gathers to encourage Cassidy to jump, thus ensuring that a major cliche gets its unruly due.

I wasn’t sure what to make of Kyra Sedgwick, who plays a hard-bitten New York TV reporter. Sedgwick’s Suzie Morales roots for the most lurid and gripping possible story. It didn’t take long for me to begin to share Suzie’s point of view.

So if I was at all tense by the end of this one, it was probably because I was waiting for someone to talk me down from the ledge disbelief.

The rights and wrongs of Oscar

I have no problem with Hugo (11 nominations) and The Artist (10 nominations) leading the field of Oscar nominees for 2012. I’m fond of both pictures, each of which is aware of and rooted in movie history. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo involves the earliest days of cinema, and The Artist focuses on the period in which silent films gave way to talkies.

If you’re interested in the entire Oscar list, you can find it at The Hollywood Reporter.

.
As for me, I'll focus on a few of the things Oscar got right and also, some of its mistakes. I'm sure you'll agree that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences does make mistakes, even if you disagree with me on what they might be.

Best Picture
Right: The Tree of Life. Not an easy choice for the Academy, but a right one.

Wrong: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and, to a lesser degree, War Horse. Neither of those pictures belongs on a list that, for my money, could have been narrowed to the traditional five contenders, The Artist, The Descendants, Hugo, The Tree of Life and Moneyball.

Best Actor in a Leading Role
Right. Demian Bichir was nominated for playing an immigrant father in A Better Life. Great choice that could serve as a career boost for the worthy Bichir.

Wrong: Gary Oldman’s portrayal of George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy might not have been the best performance in that movie, and it probably pushed Michael Fassbender (Shame) off the list. But the NC-17 rated Shame may have been too much for the Academy.

Actress in a Leading Role
Right: Michelle Williams was recognized for her work as Marilyn Monroe in the overrated My Week With Marilyn, a true act of transformation.

Wrong. Glenn Close’s nomination for her portrayal of a woman posing as a man in Albert Nobbs struck me as the major problem with that movie: I didn’t buy her in the role. Close may have pushed two better performances off the list of nominees: Kirsten Dunst’s work in Melancholia deserved recognition, as did Tilda Swinton’s performance in We Need to Talk About Kevin. Or maybe it was Rooney Mara’s nomination for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo that bumped those two gifted actresses.

And what about Elizabeth Olsen who was terrific in Martha Marcy May Marlene?

There's some real suspense in this category, though. Will perennial nominee Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady) beat out Viola Davis (The Help) as she did at the recent Golden Globes?

Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Right. Nice to see 82-year-old Max von Sydow get a nod for his work as a grandfather who chose not to speak in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Wrong. Kenneth Branagh is a wonderful actor with great skill at directing and playing Shakespeare, but I couldn't quite buy him as Laurence Olivier in My Week With Marilyn. Branagh got Olivier's voice, but not necessarily his vibe. And for a movie that spent so much effort making Michelle Williams look like Marilyn; shouldn't at least as much work have been gone into finding someone who looked more like Olivier?

An aside: Nick Nolte’s nomination for his portrayal of an alcoholic father in Warrior may mark another step in Nolte’s career redemption, but I’d have put Kevin Spacey (Margin Call) on this list before Nolte. Of course, lots of folks thought Albert Brooks would show up as nominee for his work in Drive.

But, hey, does any of this really matter? Doesn't Christopher Plummer have a lock on best-supporting actor for playing a late-blooming gay man in Beginners?

Actress in a Supporting Role
Right: Janet McTeer did the best work in Albert Nobbs; she played another woman posing as a man in 19th century Ireland.

Wrong: Melissa McCarthy was funny in Bridesmaids, but I don't see her turn as a crude but ultimately endearing woman as an Oscar turn, especially if it bumped Shaileen Woodley (The Descendants) off the list.

Here's another category that doesn't seem to allow for much suspense. Octavia Spencer (The Help) have a probably has a lock on this on.

Directing
Right: Terrence Malick was recognized for The Tree of Life, a movie that divided audiences, but stands as one of Malick’s best.

Wrong: Nothing, really.

Best Adapted Screenplay.
Right: The Descendants and Moneyball, although The Descendants is probably more right.

Wrong: I have no problem with any of the nominees (which also include Hugo, The Ides of March and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but if The Help is nominated as best picture, how could it be omitted from a list that did not include The Ides of March. And wasn't the narrative in Tinker Tailor just a wee bit confusing?

Best Original Screenplay
Right: A Separation. Ashgar Farhardi’s look at an Iranian family in distress (also nominated for best foreign-language film) is beautifully written.

Wrong: Bridesmaids. It may have been the best-written comedy of the year, but Martha Marcy May Marlene was a better-written original, as was Another Earth.

Oh well, my choices tend to skew indie, which is only one of may reasons Academy voters never asks for my opinion. Sta tuned for more as the race heats up.

She kicks butt -- and means it

Director Steven Soderbergh stops making sense, and opts for action.

The other night I was looking at Angelina Jolie's body, not an uncommon activity for male moviegoers, but my motivations had nothing to do with prurient fantasy. Watching Jolie at the 69th Golden Globes, I couldn't help thinking to myself, "God, that woman is thin."

I mention this because Jolie has appeared in a variety of movies -- notably the Lara Croft series -- that emphasize her physical prowess. Seeing the elegantly dressed Jolie at the The Golden Globes, I had a difficult time believing in her action-hero chops.

But Gina Carano, the star of director Steven Soderbergh's new thriller Haywire? She's a whole other story.

According to a fan site, Carno's a 145-pound kickboxer. Carano not only looks as if she can deliver a punch, she actually does deliver many of them, often in rapid, punishing succession.

I probably never would have heard of Carano had Soderbergh not cast her in a thriller that's notable for ... well ... Carano, as well as for some protracted, bruising action, much of it cleverly conceived.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that Carano happens to be attractive or that she's able to hold the center of an action-oriented thriller. So, if you want to see a woman who fights -- and means it, Haywire definitely fills the bill.

But beware, the plot of the movie can go as haywire as the title, and, as a colleague suggested after a preview screening, you run the risk of wearing yourself out if you try to follow it too closely.

Carano plays Mallory Kane, a woman who works for a private espionage agency. In Soderbergh's globe-hopping story, Mallory is pursued by a variety of foes, some of whom pounce on her with sudden fury.

For those who want to know a little more, I'll take a shot: Someone wants Mallory dead. Displeasure with Mallory has something to do with a Barcelona-based job in which she was hired to rescue a Chinese journalist (Anthony Brandon Wong).

Upon returning from Barcelona, Mallory is given another assignment by her boss (Ewan McGregor). He tells her that he has a really easy job for her. Reluctantly, she travels to Dublin to hook up with a British agent (Michael Fassbender). There, Mallory discovers that she's the target of an elaborate assassination plot.

Fassbender, who played a sex addict in Shame, again finds himself between a woman's legs - only this time he's subjected to strangulating punishment during a fight in a hotel room that does more damage than six drunken rock bands.

To carry out his cinematic mission, Soderbergh has hired a large and impressive cast that includes Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Channing Tatum and Bill Paxton. Don't get to worked up, though, most of these actors appear in what amount to extended cameos.

Soderbergh also gets tricky with the movie's structure. He has Carano tell the early part of the story to a befuddled young man (Michael Angarano) whose car she commandeers. Her tale is told in a series of flashbacks that feature chases on foot, excruciating brawls, and rooftop scrambles. All of this concludes with a car chase in the woods that's both novel and harrowing.

When Mallory has finished her story, the narrative shifts to the present, building toward a finale that's both pointed and a little confounding. I know that sounds impossible, but that's how it is.

Part of me wants to say that Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs have steeped the movie in needless complication and purposeless confusion. Sure, Haywire shows off Soderbergh's ability to handle action, but when set pieces become a movie's main attraction, you have to wonder why a little more care wasn't spent on storytelling.

"But wait," the Soderbergh fan in me says. Maybe there's another way to look at it. Maybe Soderbergh is offering a wry commentary on the way most Hollywood action movies are packaged and sold. Couldn't almost every action movie be called Haywire? Aren't they all wild collections of set pieces thrown around plots that make little sense? And was my colleague right? Maybe it's wrongheaded of me to want to know what motivates any of these characters.

Oh well, Whatever Soderbergh had in mind, he's found the right woman for the job. Put another way, you come away from the movie believing that Carano easily could kick Jolie's butt -- and maybe even take on her share of punks with names like Bruce, Arnold and Sylvester.

Besides, there's one thing I know for sure: McGregor has the worst hair cut I've seen in a movie in a long time, especially for someone who's not playing a death-row prisoner who's about to be fried.