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Director Steven Soderberg's latest movie is an action thriller with an all-star cast and a new leading lady who has an interesting back story of her own. It's called “Haywire.”

Gina Carano, who stars here, is a real life mixed martial arts fighter who's appeared previously on TV in numerous bouts. Soderberg cast her in “Haywire” to show off her skills, and display them she does. Playing Mallory Kane, she's a highly-trained covert operative who works for a government security contractor.

But something went mysteriously wrong with her last mission. Now she's a fugitive on the run trying to find out who double-crossed her and exact some revenge.

Mallory takes on several male adversaries, and with real life Carona's fighting background, she winds up kicking some serious butt along the way. The fight scenes are a lot fun to watch and they're choreographed well. But there's never any doubt, in any of these battles, who'll come out victorious, and that lack of suspense is one of the films' problems.

The plot is very confusing, making what's going on with the characters hard to follow. The storyline is loaded with baffling twists and turns, incomprehensible double-crosses and botched spy missions that have no context.

Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor and several other stars wander in and out of the movie, in various global locales, for a brief few minutes. So it's really Carano's film and she is fun to watch, for a while anyway.

There's also a good car chase thrown in for good measure here. But Soderberg's attempt at combining a piece of 007 with “La Femme Nikita” and TV's “Alias” comes up short.

Stylistically it has some things going for it, but the characters and plot are so slipshod that you won't really care after about a half hour what's going on.