Steven Soderbergh’s highly polished, throw-back spy thriller, Haywire, is an attempt at pure genre filmmaking. Utilitarian characterization, a singularly focused plot, and a deadpan heroin, Mallory (Gina Carano), the movie is not encumbered by knowingness, unhindered by rough textures or subtext. You might say it is a film about surface, but it is really a film that is surface. Soderbergh’s fingerprints are everywhere: schizophrenic media, style with sheen, rich, neon-primal colors that smack of early video refined, bright blues, yellows, and greens. When the script allows, Soderbergh leads his characters through sets that are both minimal by design, but grand in scale, creating a tension between the visual language of opera and advertising. Haywire’s visual style is meticulous and its theatrics poker-faced. The irony is that in spite of the movie’s title, Haywire is tightly-reined and always under control.

But Haywire moves; it is one long chase. It begins, in Tarantino fashion, at a diner. Mallory is in upstate New York, and when she sees Aaron (Channing Tatum) drive up in the parking lot, she swears. That’s all we need to know. Moments later, their conversation disintegrates into a wildly choreographed fight sequence, and the entire scene tells us that writer Lem Dobbs has little use for words. Characters speak in Haywire through their eyes, but mostly through their fists, and combat works out all the tension created in the film’s pot-lidded moments. We wait for hand-to-hand combat like a sex scene in a romantic comedy, and for all intensive purposes the voluptuously, agile, and fierce Mallory enjoys a good fight more than a good lay.

Carano herself is known more as a mixed martial arts champion than as an actress, which not only lends an authenticity to the fight choreography, but also a pulpy feistiness to Carano’s character. If you’re looking for smooth, cinematic-style acting, with all of its natural motions and psychological textures, you’ll call Carano’s performance stiff and poor. But it is precisely her stony awkwardness, the way she continually falls back on a tight grimace and studied stare, as if she is slightly embarrassed by all the lights and attention, that make her character the thick-outlined silhouette Soderbergh is looking for. Again, Tarantino comes to mind, but this time it’s Kill Bill.

Mallory is in a pickle. She is an agent for hire, but her company, run by the smarmy Kenneth (Ewan McGregor), seems to be turning against her. It all goes wrong inBarcelona, where, a few days before the diner scene, Mallory, Aaron, and a few other agents rescued a kidnapped journalist, Jiang (Anthony Brandon Wong). But Mallory begins to suspect her client, Rodrigo (Antonio Banderas), as well as Kenneth, when she is quickly whisked to her next job, where she is supposed to merely play wife to Michael Fassbender’s MI6 agent, Paul. Like the diner scene, it all goes wrong.

Mallory is a woman on the run, and much of Haywire is spent watching her run. She is a naturalized superhero, like batman, who doesn’t have a premonition about how to break out of jams, she has to figure them out she goes along. As a result, there are plenty of scenes of Mallory running through corridors, down streets, or across rooftops, looking around, figuring out the puzzle. Soderbergh places us right there, and we almost want to shout advice at the screen: “I thought I saw a window, go left!” This is the kind of action movie that critics like to call “smart.” But Haywire is really just solicitous. It is a film about nothing except the way movies can create the illusion that we’re moving at 100 mph. And sometimes, it just feels good to drive.