Hi, this is Dana Steven Slate's movie critic here with the first Slate spoiler special of 2012.

Joining me in the Slate Studios is John Swansberg.

Good morning.

Hello, John. You're the culture editor for Slate.

I am.

And you are joining me to talk about Haywire, the new Steven Soderberg, action thriller, would you call it?

Yeah, action thriller. So Steven Stodberg, I guess, has this expression, one for me, one for them, having to do with his incredibly prolific career and how he essentially makes a movie to make money, one of his Oceans 11 movies or something big budget, an action type movie, and then makes something for himself, which can get as weird as his Kafka movie starring Jeremy Irons.

Right.

Or a bubble where he shot a movie all in digital and

used non-actors and... Like the girlfriend experience, right? The recent movie he made

starring the porn star, Sasha Gray. So would you consider this a one for him or a one for

everybody else? It's weird. I feel like this one in a way straddles the line because it feels

slightly low budget in some ways,

or maybe it's more, it's kind of, it felt sort of slapdash. But it also clear, it's an action

movie. It seems to be made to be a crowd pleaser. So in that sense, it feels like a kind of

more of a Hollywood style movie. But it doesn't, I don't know, it doesn't feel, it's not nearly as like glitzy or star-studded or slick as the ocean's movies.

There's something very odd about this movie's approach that I can't figure out whether it's deliberate or not.

I feel like if and when I say this in my review, Defenders of Soderberg and this movie are going to pop up and say, but all that was deliberate. And I can't be sure that they weren't right because I feel like he's so knowledgeable

about film. He's such a sophisticated filmmaker in terms of the techniques he can master and the

different voices he can take on and kind of what a shapeshifter he is, that people can just say,

well, he's trying to make a schlucky action blockbuster. But to me, this was just a little bit too schlocky below the line. Well, the big stick of this movie that you have to know about going in is that it stars this woman,

Gina Carrano, who's a mixed martial arts star and has never acted before. So like Sasha

...