This Week at the Movies: 'Haywire,' 'Miss Bala' 'Red Tails'

The multiplexes were filled with action packed, globe trotting new releases this past weekend that followed assassins, military pilots and drug cartels to Spain, Italy, Germany, Ireland and Mexico.

Steven Soderbergh’s “Haywire” is a slow burn thriller that mostly plays out against European backdrops as a black ops soldier, played by mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano, seeks out the men – Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum and Ewan McGregor - who double crossed her during a rescue mission and bumps them off.

The picture does not rank among Soderbergh’s best crime films, which include “Traffic” and “Out of Sight,” but it is a breath of fresh air for a Hollywood spy thriller.

There are action sequences, all of which contain an impressive amount of athleticism, but the film is driven by mood, rather than set pieces.

“Haywire” is filmed in the style of a B-thriller and displays none of the flashiness that marked Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s 11” films. To say the film is a minor one in the director’s oeuvre is not an insult to the picture, which is a solid addition to its genre.

“Red Tails,” on the other hand is a well-intentioned, but only moderately successful, attempt to make a big budget film honoring the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of black pilots who not only undertook a number of dangerous missions as bomber escorts during World War II, but also fought racial discrimination within the American military.

The film was directed by Anthony Hemingway, but it is executive producer George Lucas who has been planning a film on the airmen for several decades.

His fascination with aerial dogfights is evident in his “Star Wars” films – and therein lies the problem with “Red Tails.” This is an action film in which the lead characters just happen to be the Tuskegee Airmen.

While the film’s tone toward the pilots is obviously reverential, the picture wastes an opportunity to examine the stress these men must have faced as they struggled to balance their fight for equal rights with the dangers of combat. Racial tension between the black and white pilots is present throughout the picture, but individual conflicts are too easily resolved.

The film’s selling points are its beautifully shot flight sequences and the solid performances from its cast, which includes Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Nate Parker.

It’s just not the Tuskegee Airmen movie for which you may have been hoping.

Gerardo Naranjo’s grim Mexican drug cartel crime thriller “Miss Bala” is the weekend’s best selection.

Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman) is a beautiful young woman from a modest upbringing whose aim is to enter the Miss Baja beauty contest.

One night, she happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time as a vicious drug cartel carries out a hit on a party full of policemen.

Laura witnesses the crime and ends up becoming a pawn in the cartel’s operations. To save the life of her younger brother and father, she is forced to smuggle currency across the border into the United States and to become the lover of the cartel’s leader.

“Miss Bala,” which translates to “Miss Bullet,” is an intense, violent film. Laura finds herself in the middle of a frightening daytime shootout between the police and the cartel. Her later dealings with the authorities and a Mexican general are equally unsettling. The good guys are only slightly more sympathetic toward her plight than her captors.

Much like 2008’s “Gomorrah” and Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Pusher” trilogy, “Miss Bala” uses gritty realism, sudden outbreaks of violence and a ripped-from-the-headlines story that makes it all too plausible. It’s an intense movie-going experience.

Nathan Duke is editor of Douglaston Patch.