It’s an understatement to suggest that film director Steven Soderbergh has a varied résumé. The guy seems up for anything: talky arthouse (Sex, Lies and Videotape, The Girlfriend Experience), cool crime (Out of Sight, The Limey), mainstream crowd-pleaser (Erin Brockovich, Contagion, Ocean’s 11), even sci-fi (Solaris) and poli-sci fi (Che) thrown in for good measure. Soderbergh’s latest, the double-crossed assassin thriller Haywire, sees the auteur take on one of the most challenging tasks in filmmaking: the near-impossible task of turning a professional athlete into a movie star.

The pro athlete in question is Mixed Martial Arts star Gina Carano, the best-known woman in her sport. Sure, it’s a safe bet that MMA and the action/spy genre have many fans in common. Sure, Carano will deliver more viscerally convincing fight scenes than, say, a Hollywood glamazon like Angelina Jolie. Sure, Soderbergh has put a roster of pretty decent actors (Michael Fassbender, Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Mathieu Kassovitz) in Carano’s corner to provide dramatic support. Still, when athletes take to the big screen, audiences aren’t usually knocked out as much as they are forced into a painful submission.

To wit: the film oeuvre of the otherwise popular and reasonably charismatic NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal. From his boombox genie in Kazaam (1996) to his clowny hammer-swinging superhero in Steel (TK), Shaq’s films aren’t just bad —they’re almost incomprehensible.

Speaking of incomprehensible, 1985’s Gymkata may be the most notoriously awful example of the horrors that occur when athletes make the move to the big screen. Real-life Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas plays, wait for it, a gymnast recruited by a super-secret spy agency to compete in — well, win — a super-secret martial arts competition in order to save the USA from nuclear annihilation. Even if that actually happened in real life (did I really just type that?), it still wouldn’t make anyone care about men’s gymnastics. Gymkata takes two seemingly disparate elements — gymnastics and chop-socky — and combines them in the least-functional, most humiliating way possible. It’s a veritable human centipede of a movie.

Movie history does offer some hope for Soderbergh, Carano and Haywire. No, it’s most definitely not synchronized swimmer Estella Warren in Tim Burton’s 2001 Planet of the Apes remake. But it is similar. I mean, simian.

In the early days of Hollywood, one particular athlete-become-actor proved that sports stars can turn athletic ability into a long and profitable movie career. After earning multiple gold medals in the 1924 and 1928 Games, Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller took his physique and physicality to Tinseltown and won the starring role in 1932’s Tarzan the Ape Man. Weissmuller went on to play the Lord of the Jungle in 11 more features, eventually branching out into other non-Tarzan jungle adventures. Mind you, despite the popularity of his movies, Weissmuller didn’t achieve any especially high dramatic standards. In most of his Tarzan flicks, he was literally out-acted by a trained chimpanzee.

Maybe Carano can do better than Weissmuller; she can hardly do worse than Shaq. Nevertheless, Soderbergh fans should be curious to see if the accomplished director has the skills to break the curse of the actor athlete, and whether Haywire will land a KO, or turn out just OK.

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Image courtesy of Alliance Films.