Havoc Review - Bursts of action brilliance ruined by everything else

“You can’t reason with gang violence: you can’t talk to it, sit it at the table, and negotiate with it.” - Greg Boyle

After completing The Raid 2, Gareth Evans hit a crossroads. He could continue making action movies, and everyone would eat it up. Instead he branched out to another genre that could utilize his propensity for carnage and that was horror. He gave us the underrated religious, body horror, Apostle, starring the up and coming, Dan Stevens. It is a psychologically driven nightmare resulting in dirty, filthy violence caked in mud and gore all under a cloud of religious extremism. With his talents and a story aching for grimy chaos, Apostle came out as another success for Evans. He then turned to television to tell his style of story through action with the exhilarating crime series, Gangs of London. And then came the long freeze.

Not long after the well received series, he wanted to return to action thrillers with Havoc, starring Tom Hardy. And as usual he got to work but obstacles, like never before in cinema, began to pile up as they did for virtually anyone in the business. COVID struck, shutting everything down. Then in the most zany example of when it rains, it pours, a writer's strike happened followed shortly by an actor strike. Hollywood was seriously struggling to return from the pandemic only to smash head first into a brick wall. Luckily it lasted less than a year but the damage was done. Productions slowly crawled back to life and movies and television shows were beginning to find their proper place in front of an audience.

As all this was taking place, Gareth Evans was no exception when feeling the turmoil of a real-life, worldwide pandemic followed soon after by not one, but two strikes. In the midst of it all was his starving new project, Havoc. Production began in July of 2021 and finished in October of 2021. For nearly four years the production was heavily affected by reshoots and inescapable delays. It took nearly 5 full years to produce a hundred minute action movie and so now that it’s finally here, only two questions remain – how is it and was it worth the wait?

I wish I could shout from the rooftops in euphoria over its magnitude and after The Raid films, I fully expected to do so. Unfortunately reality, it would appear, has other plans for Havoc. For example, an apparent, glaringly obvious, oversight of everything from plot to CGI, Havoc is a limping marathon runner hoping to cross the finish line despite a horrid lack of preparedness. When you’ve seen The Raid films, and it can’t be overstated, those two movies are in the upper echelon of extraordinary action movies, and you’ve experienced his salacious appetite for bloody, satisfying horror in Apostle, all with tremendous production design, it boggles the mind as to what happened with Havoc.

Now if you want to hide behind “artistic choices” as the reasoning behind this movie looking like a giant video game cutscene, feel free to delude yourself if that’s what you need to do. I want to join you there if I’m honest. I’m such a fan of Evans and will defend his work ‘til I’m blue in the face but so much of this movie is beyond redemption. It looks absolutely atrocious. Five years in the making and this is what we were waiting for? I screamed that this should have received a theatrical release and now I see it was never worthy of the big screen.

The plot is a whole other mess as well. It’s cliched with overused crime tropes like crooked cops, crooked politicians and gang rivals influencing both camps. It is a lesser, far more convoluted, version of a thousand other crime dramas that for some of them, achieved far more with far less. And worst of all? It takes forever getting to the reason we’re even watching in the first place.

In The Raid, it’s a very straight forward premise and when it kicks off, it never relents. The Raid 2 takes a more dramatic approach trying to flesh out the world lightly established in part one. It’s a longer, slower story in the beginning but always feels important and always feels as if it’s going somewhere. And then, much in the same way in part one, when the action starts, it is relentless.

At no point does Havoc’s meandering feel necessary in getting us from the opening computer game chase sequence to the real meat and potatoes. It all feels as if the point to this whole thing was lost and found halfway through, eventually delivering some rather exhilarating action sequences.

Particularly in the third act is when quintessential Evans finally gives us what’s been held back for nearly five years. Tom Hardy and company shooting with unrestrained fervor mixed with brutal hand to hand combat reminiscent of The Raid. It possesses the DNA of The Raid films, but this nepo baby is no successor to Marlon Brando in The Godfather. It’s a work in progress at best, somehow still not completed after five years, that managed to eek by and receive a premiere date. But there is no denying, it demonstrates bursts of brilliance in motion that prove despite this mess of a movie, Gareth Evans is still a first-rate filmmaker, who maybe just happened to step on a pebble in his shoe.

If all this wasn’t disappointing enough, it committed the frustratingly common (lately) mistake of making Tom Hardy the least interesting person in the room. After years of enduring the Venom movies, I thought he would return to the gritty stylings that made him such a phenomenal, sought after actor. And of course, for reasons beyond his control (I’m telling myself it was beyond his control, let me have this) he returns with this. He is an unlikable, degenerate crooked cop and absentee father who has manipulated and murdered his way to a career as a police officer. Rather than coming off as jaded, which I think was the intent(?), he just comes off as grumpy, like he needs a couple Advil and a nap. It’s a hollow way of showing his indifference to everyone and everything beyond his own self interests. Much like the muddled plot, it’s lazy writing delivered even worse by a talented actor who’s above all of this.

When it comes to the action, the gunplay and close quarter combat, Havoc is a blast of energy, extravagant violence, excessive gore and extreme frivolity. Tom Hardy is a physical presence that makes it hard to look away when he’s breaking bones. The “action-ness” of it all is superior, it’s everything surrounding it that pulls the whole thing into an unfortunate place of mediocrity and eventual anonymity as you scroll past it on Netflix. You’ll see the name, recall its potential, think, “Huh…” and move on never thinking of it again until your next Netflix doom scroll. Havoc is a carcass of unrealized potential floundering for about seventy percent of it, the remarkable, remaining thirty percent destined to be chained in unloved wedlock forever. This may be my most disappointing movie of the year, so far at least.