This originally began as a straight review of Soderbergh’s latest cinematic offering, Haywire, though the elements at play within this film, and over his career of late, have required something a bit more. So, let’s talk about taking risks in filmmaking.

The way things normally run for most people, they begin their careers (or pre-careers) as the bold, inventive risk-takers, willing and even eager to push the envelope, experimenting with technique, genre and methods of production. Or at least, that's how it's supposed to run. The goal is to see what makes a good film, or at least what the filmmaker feels is the best way to make the kind of films they want to make. As the career goes on, the pattern becomes established, the methods solidified, the need to take risks diminished. Perhaps the filmmaker wishes to achieve career stability, or maybe they feel the weight of other people’s money and expectation on their back, or maybe they genuinely feel like they have realised their goal and are making the kinds of films they want to make without the need for further experimentation… Steven Soderbergh isn’t really one of these people.

Soderbergh has always been something of an interesting case study as a filmmaker within Hollywood. A fan and student of all film, as well as the behind the scenes workings of it all, he has worked his way into a fairly unique position within the filmmaking community, striking himself somewhere between the film literacy of Martin Scorsese and the maverick sensibility of John Cassavetes. He’s also developed the kind of relationships within the acting world that mean he can assemble a cast like no one since Robert Altman. He has shown an interest in language, in history, in film in general, and a willingness to push himself and his actors for a project. His versatility with the films he makes, as well as his technical capability in the actual nuts and bolts of various aspects of the craft, have garnered him a great respect amongst filmmakers, actors and many others throughout the movie world.

However, as would happen, cracks eventually began to appear. Back in 2002, Soderbergh made Full Frontal, a comedy drama about a group of disparate people in Hollywood coming together at a mutual friend’s birthday party. Sort of like Crash for the art film crowd. It was a project with a pretty good cast, a meagre $2million budget and a list of rules that mostly tried to make things as close to amateur production as possible (everyone does their own hair and make-up, provide their own lunch, etc.). Interesting as an experiment, it was a critical bomb that just barely made its money back. Then there was 2004’s Ocean’s Twelve, which is regarded by all as the weakest of the trilogy, and for good reason. Then there was The Good German, which was an incredibly stylish 1940s throwback, but little more than that (and another financial disaster to boot). Come 2008 and Soderbergh released his two-part biopic of Che Guevara, starring Benicio Del Toro. Though a critical success (which still gives me pause to this day), it was yet another financial failure. Soderbergh followed this with another big risk, making The Girlfriend Experience with the lead role taken by a dramatically untested then-active porn star, Sasha Grey. Though many thought Grey was actually pretty good, overall reviews were mixed, and the film was still unable to recoup even its paltry $1.3million budget. We’ll skip over his last film, Contagion, because it’s with the experimental casting that we shall leap forward to his latest, Haywire.

The seed behind Haywire apparently came to Soderbergh when he was watching TV one night, an MMA event in which he saw one Gina Carano, a former-American Gladiator and mixed martial artist. Soderbergh saw something in Carano he wanted to put to use in an idea he had. That Carano had just begun breaking into acting, it seemed like a perfect fit. A story was put together about a covert operative-for-hire being double-crossed during a job in Dublin, who then goes on the run, evading police and slowly making her way back home so she can confront her betrayers and exact revenge. Deals were made and production began, and now we have the end result.

Despite many positive reviews, certainly amongst the more positive that Soderbergh has had for some time, Haywire is an unpleasant movie-going experience. Looking first to Gina Carano’s performance, it’s a rather poor one. As she would be, she’s certainly convincing in the fight scenes, which have an abrupt brutality to them. It really does look like Carano and Channing Tatum are knocking six bells out of each other. However, it’s everywhere else that she falls short. At least with casting a porn star as the lead in The Girlfriend Experience, there is a degree of acting experience in that prior job, an element of maintaining a pretence of whatever the scene happens to be about before, you know, stuff happens. There’s not much overlap here. Carano delivers every line as if she were just asked to repeat the same tedious task once again, “What, really? Again? Fine.” It’s also rather interesting to note that, in light of the fact that her delivery is such a problem, her voice was made a little lower in post-production, giving her a deeper tone. I can’t help but think this maybe works against her. Perhaps she will get better in future projects, but this is a less than auspicious jump into proceedings.

The manner in which the film unfolds is problematic, too. Soderbergh has always had a unique look in his films, thanks mostly to the fact that he has acted as cinematographer on many of them, always under the pseudonym Peter Andrews. However, Haywire has an unpleasant and murky look. Rather than balancing or complimenting each other, the lights and darks here sit awkwardly next to one another, encroaching on the other’s territory. It’s meant to have a raw, edgy feel, but instead just comes across as amateurish. The editing itself is clunky and rather patchwork. Nothing flows as well as it should, which just makes it all the more unpleasant to watch. And Soderbergh’s overall direction just feels… well, this is exactly the point I’ve been working towards.

Soderbergh has been playing a game over the past year. It was almost a year ago now when he announced that he was going to retire from the filmmaking business. Whether he had grown tired of the poor critical reception, or the less than stellar financial gains, or just the general slog of the filmmaking process, Soderbergh seems to have been circling the drain for a while. Then, suddenly, about six months ago, he announced that it was not retirement, rather just a break from the business. However, when looking back over his projects in the last decade - his experiments, his choices, his directions, his diminishing returns - and his comments about perhaps retiring from it all, it starts to create the impression of a filmmaker who has become bored. Bored, dissatisfied, uneasy in his career, it feels like the reason he is pushing himself with all these different trials is because he’s trying to keep his interest in filmmaking alive. It’s something that is such a big part of his life, but some of the sheen has come off.

The spirit of experimentation is absolutely vital to filmmaking, as it is in any art form, but Soderbergh’s efforts have long since begun to look like those of someone trying to stem the tide of his own half-assedness. By taking the kind of risks that an amateur filmmaker would make, he is effectively regressing to the level of an amateur filmmaker. An unquestionably talented one, but one who has still to settle within his own style, who has still to find his own voice. This is not what you expect from an Oscar-winning director with over twenty years experience. He's shooting for something akin to an American actioner delivered in a sparse European manner, but he's instead landed on a better cast version of China O'Brien. Soderbergh's need to experiment has now become the thing that is crippling him.

Haywire is an action film that was made to keep the man who made it awake, but its influences are too confused, its story too needlessly convoluted, its direction too uninterested in itself to work. And if the director can’t muster up the focus to provide a good film, how exactly is anyone else meant to take it?

Paul Costello also has a daily movie review blog called A Cinephile’s Journey, looking at films old and new.