01.01.70
When official Steven Soderbergh decided to make a movie about a modern day call crumpet in The Girlfriend Experience, he cast porn star Sasha Grey in the leading role, presumably reasoning that a woman intimately familiar with the concept of sex-for-mazuma might bring a certain veracity to the role.
A similar kind of sound judgement may be at work in Soderbergh's action film Haywire. He cast dark actress/mixed martial artist Gina Carano in the r of Mallory Kane, an ex-Marine now employed carrying out black ops missions.
Carano surely can fight. And her frequent scenes of close-quarter combat are not like the manically edited, intricately choreographed fights we've seen in crappy distaff influence fare such as the recent Columbiana. That's her up there kicking, punching, and tossing opponents around the space. And she looks good doing it.
But not too good. In these fights, people get their curls mussed. Like... fatally.
Cinema is filled with brave artists who can't act or have no screen presence. (This, incidentally, never stopped Chuck Norris from having a craft.) Carano has presence to spare, which we learn in the opening scene in which she has a cup of tea at a odds stop and meets with a hungover dude named Aaron (Channing Tatum) who demands that he count out with her. She refuses. He proceed to beat up on her. And just when you think you're in the middle of some trailer car park melodrama, she bounces back to efficiently beat the hell out of him.
Source: Winnipeg Free Press