Havoc

dir: Gareth Evans

2025

It’s… it’s not good.

Why, yes, I did have sky high expectations based on this chap’s previous work. So if anyone’s at fault, it’s me. Certainly not the director or the star of this misbegotten amalgamation of every action film from the last forty years.

I can see what he was going for, I honestly can. Before I even read a word of an interview where Evans specifically says he wanted to capture the feel and the energy of John Woo flicks from the late 80s early 90s (more A Better Tomorrow, The Killer and Hard Boiled rather than his Hollywood flicks), I could tell.

But that’s not what we’ve got. What we’ve got is Tom Hardy playing a corrupt cop who mumbles his way through a flick constructed with city scenes that are, honest to goodness, computer generated rather than filmed on a city street. Like, I could have recorded that same kind of second unit filler footage on my phone, and it would have looked better, and no-one would be able to tell it was downtown Melbourne if I got the angle right.

This film tries to transpire in a generic American city, and yet it was made in Wales. In fucking Wales! Why aren’t there Welsh people talking about being The Only Gay in the Village or saying elaborate pronunciations of Welsh names like Myfanwy or Owain Glyndwr out loud?

Instead we’ve got all these shmucks putting on lame American accents. I mean, Forest Whittaker and Timothy Oliphant probably don’t have to change their accents, but then why are they in this flick anyway? Timothy Oliphant is probably the only person in this disaster who can be said to be slumming it. Everyone else is exactly where they deserve to be.

This film is long boring conversations no-one is interested in interspersed with only two genuine action sequences, you know, what we came for, which are marred by the use of something I thought we’d seen the last of years ago, which is shaky cam. I can almost forgive all the scenes where the footage is “sped up”, so to speak, to make you feel like a crackhead while watching it. But the shaky cam is unforgivable.

No-one, absolutely no-one asked for that to come back. Is anyone nostalgic about that time when action flicks simulated, what, watching something from the inside of a washing machine? Where action was somehow meant to be improved if you could barely identify what was happening on screen because it seemed like the cameraperson had violent Parkinson’s like uncontrollable shaking?

Over ten years ago film people got the message that audiences hated this bullshit. Also, they got better cameras. Also, Tony Scott died, who was one of the worst offenders when it came to shaky cam and over-editing.

Someone or something convinced Gareth Evans to bring it back, bring it back, bring it back to me. And I don’t appreciate it, Gareth. In fact I fucking hate it.

It’s rare for someone like me, or who is me, to say that the action sequences in something aren’t good enough to justify watching the whole flick. I’m usually able to say “sure, the dialogue is generic place filling time killing drivel, but the flick totally comes alive once so and so starts doing what we came for with a rusty pencil and a celery stick that’s on the turn.”

That’s who I am. A positive person. Someone who tries to support the little guy in the filmic universe. I’m not here to alienate people or dismiss their dreams. I’m here to celebrate what can be celebrated, and ignore what doesn’t shine like silver or gold.

But I can’t do it. This film failed at some of the basic elements that most flicks basically manage in order to seem semi-competent. And I have no doubt that behind the scenes stuff probably contributed to making this flick fail so hard. They had years to try and fix it up, since I think they started production on this during the covid era, then they tried again when the SAG-AFTRA strikes were happening, and four years later the flick still woofs and has fleas.

Hardy, I am guessing, is probably not easy to work with. He seems like the kind of jerk who doesn’t take direction from anyone, no suggestions, no notes, no advice. He gets an idea in his head of how he’s going to play one of his (jerk) roles, and then runs with that and only that.

His character of Walker here must have felt beneath him. I mean, he’s played all sorts of heroes and villains, but rarely has he played a role where he seems too bored to learn his lines and just mutters generic cop talk about not wanting a partner and preferring to work alone and maybe doing some overtime and grousing about his ex-wife and holy fuck just stop for the love of gods stop.

He's given a “new” partner in the form of a young Asian-American cop (Jessie Mei Li, who’s British), which makes no sense, since he’s a detective, and she’s a fresh out of the academy beat cop, and he grumbles and complains and then she’s not working with him anymore, because he’s doing some outlandish stuff in the service of some real estate tycoon running for mayor of this generic town (Whittaker) but then there’s something about some thieves who stole some cocaine in washing machines and then the other corrupt cops led by Olyphant’s character want the cocaine and kill these Chinatown triads but people think some girl and her boyfriend who’s the son of the tycoon killed the triads and the triad leader has a mother who’s an even more ruthless triad leader and and and…

I could say that the plot is needlessly complicated but really it’s not nearly complicated enough. In an action flick with cops and crims there don’t need to be heightened reasons as to why they’re involved in heroic bloodshed shootouts or fast paced bone crunching fights with their enemies. Cops good crims bad cops want to arrest baddies but will settle for killing them. Baddies want to hold on to money and power and will happily kill cops and their families to maintain status quo. Action scenes ensue. It almost writes itself without the help of AIs.

I can almost say that the action scene at the nightclub is almost worth it, but we had to wade through a lot of bullshit before and after to get there. It also isn’t anywhere great enough to justify our time spent with it. There are some moments that are pretty good, but it doesn’t cohere well overall. The action sequences have moments that work but you don’t get a sense of escalating tension or a crescendo, or like it’s building towards anything. It’s just some stuff that’s happening, which you can say about any part of life, really.

And there’s a big action sequence at the end. I could say that all of this ties together in a way that argues that with a little bit of trust and communication, all of this could have been avoided, but then that would make all the protagonists / antagonists seem a bit dim.

I did enjoy seeing Olyphant playing a baddie again. Let’s not forget that, for all the leering going on in his silver fox era, he played some wretched bastards back in the day before all the Deadwood and Justified praise. And here, yeah, he’s sleepwalking through an easy part, but he does better than anyone else, because he’s not trying. It would possibly help as well if the film wasn’t as drab and murky as they’ve deliberately made it. Trying to make a contemporary flick look like an artefact doesn’t always work out. Certainly not in this case.

I would say that Havoc was a waste of my time, but I was watching it late on a Friday night, and it’s not like I could have been doing something else at that time. There’s not as much opportunity cost, to use the economics term in its rightful context. So while it killed time, it did so disagreeably, which I cannot forgive.

4 times this is substandard even compared to Jason Statham movies, the John Wick flicks and even the thoroughly stupid Venom movies that at least had a reason for Tom Hardy to be so sweaty all the time out of 10

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“You fuckin' serious? I can't help you with this. Your son just started a gang war. They just wanna shoot him dead. That's the end of his story.” – I bet it sounded more impressive back when Shakespeare originally wrote it - Havoc