‘Havoc’ Review

If you want to turn your brain off, and watch Tom Hardy fly in from offscreen to dropkick a gangster in a bustling night club, ‘Havoc’ is the movie for you.

But if you’re looking for a well crafted action film, with memorable characters, dialogue, and set pieces, maybe keep scrolling.

‘Havoc’, Gareth Evans’ latest action film for Netflix, opens with a chase scene as a group of young thieves in a truck full of cocaine and washing machines flee the police. After escaping the police, these thieves, led by the couple Charlie and Mia (Justin Cornwell and Quelin Sepulveda), meet up with the local Triad boss to sell the cocaine. This drug deal is interrupted by a shooting, which brings Patrick Walker (Tom Hardy) to the scene of the crime.

Walker is the classic action movie antihero: gruff and intense, estranged from his wife and kid, with a checkered past that blurs the line of right and wrong. The young thief Charlie just so happens to be the son of local politician Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker), who just so happens to have blackmail evidence on Walker. He asks him to find his son and bring him home safely, away from the Triads, away from the police.

If this all sounds too convoluted, that’s because it is. ‘Havoc’ introduces so many characters, so quickly, that their names and relationships are barely established, and those that are established barely matter. The dialogue, especially in the beginning, is filled with action movie cliches and exposition dumps. There are no subtle hints about Tom Hardy’s questionable past, he tells us all about it himself in voiceover.

Gareth Evans established himself as an action filmmaker to watch with the Indonesian duology of ‘The Raid’ and ‘The Raid 2’. Those movies are a masterclass in minimalist action directing. With trained fighters in all of the roles, Evans sits back with his camera and lets the performers work, each fight scene clearly presented and no less violent for it. In ‘Havoc’, working with Hollywood talent and guns, Evans is much less assured in his direction. With the exception of an extended fight scene in a nightclub about halfway through the film — it seems to be mandatory that all action films contain at least one exceptional action scene in a nightclub – the action sequences are all darkly lit, overly stylized, and worst of all, confusing. Where his previous films could rely on real time editing to give its action a sense of powerful immediacy, Evans here uses slow motion bursts in an attempt to artificially create drama. These flourishes, unfortunately, just make the sense of time and space even more bewildering.

The confusion is not limited to the action scenes, as all of the characters and their relationships are so ill defined as to be more frustrating than intriguing. Alliances, motivations, double crosses occur at such a speed that it’s difficult to follow. In shootouts, some characters turn on others, but because they were so recently introduced, my reaction was less shock than … wut?

What Evans’ action scenes lack in clarity, they make up for with squibs. Every grazing bullet results in an explosion of blood coming out of the characters. Evans also harkens back to an era before John Wick, when everybody had unlimited ammo and they weren’t afraid to use it. I laughed several times as a character would just keep firing a machine gun into a clearly dead person’s face for an amount of screen time beyond all reason.

All of this – its absurdity, its self seriousness while still being cartoonish – belies the fun that can be had here. Tom Hardy brings an intensity to every line reading, Timothy Olyphant brings his trademark charm with violence bubbling just under the surface, and the blood pours liberally. And yet these small delights are overwhelmed by how overwrought the story is. As an overly confusing yet somehow still mindless contradiction, ‘Havoc’ is an obvious step down from Gareth Evans’ best work.

Havoc
Rated TV-MA
Running Time: 1 hour and 47 minutes

Director Gareth Evans
Writers Gareth Evans
Stars Tom Hardy, Jesse Mei Li, Justin Cornwell, Quelin Sepulveda, Luis Guzmán, Yeo Yann Yann, Timothy Olyphant, Forest Whitaker
Rating TV-MA
Running Time 107 Minutes
Genres Thriller, Crime, Action, Mystery