Review: Havoc
Gareth Evans is back on Netflix after 2018’s Apostle with a new gritty action movie, Havoc. While Evans made his name with the brutally efficient Raid films, Havoc trades the stripped-down survival narrative for something much more sprawling—and sometimes, a little too sprawling for its own good.
Tom Hardy stars as a detective named Walker who gets sucked deep into the city’s criminal underworld after a drug deal goes sideways and has to race Triad assassins, corrupt cops and other criminal elements to find the son of a local, powerful politician. Hardy is doing his thing, a mix of grizzled and bizarre, with random character tics and sudden outbursts. It’s also fun to see Timothy Olyphant in a sleazy, villainous role, and Michelle Waterson is great as the main Triad assassin who is equally adept with shotguns as martial arts.
The action, as expected, is top-notch, with every punch, kick, and gunshot having bone-crunching and kinetic energy. Evans took a slight turn stylistically for Havoc, with the action feeling way more John Woo than the martial arts-focused Raid films. Expect lots of shootouts, slow-motion dives, and stylish, operatic gunplay that feels like it was ripped straight out of Hard Boiled. It’s still hard-hitting and brutal, but there’s a balletic flair that’s a new and welcome addition to Evans’ bag of tricks, which, in contrast to the extremely gritty feel of the urban setting, is so stylized it feels like we’re in Gotham City. There’s a film grain over everything as well. There is a more hand-to-hand-based fight in a nightclub that feels like more “classic” Evans action, but even that has more of an emphasis on firepower. If you come to Havoc looking for beautifully choreographed mayhem, you’ll leave more than satisfied, but it does take a while to get cooking, with just about an hour before the first massive action sequence.
Where Havoc stumbles is in the story department. Compared to the laser-focused simplicity of The Raid, the plot here is needlessly complicated, with double-crosses, corrupt politicians, and criminal syndicates all fighting for screen time. Evans tries to build a sprawling crime epic, but sometimes it feels like he’s juggling too many threads, slowing down the momentum between the incredible setpieces. I haven’t had a chance to see it yet, but I would assume this may be a byproduct of working on the TV series Gangs of London, and it probably works better when you have a full season of TV and not trying to cram it into slightly under two hours for a movie.
That said, even with its narrative bloat, Havoc delivers exactly what you’d want from a Gareth Evans/Tom Hardy team-up: stylish violence, brutal and technically proficient action sequences, and a lead performance that’s pure Hardy. It may not dethrone The Raid as Evans’ masterpiece, but Havoc proves that any new film from him is an event when it comes to action filmmaking.
