HAVOC is the long-anticipated, straight-to-Netflix fifth film of Gareth Evans, director of the 21st century classic THE RAID. It contains plenty of the brutal, incredible action you’d hope for from such an artist, but it’s a different type of movie, an atmospheric and stylized (but also ridiculously violent) noir about a deadbeat homicide detective whose claim to heroism is that he’s the one guy in a circle of corrupt cops who felty guilty after they executed an undercover cop during a robbery. Now he has no friends or family and he does dirty deeds for a powerful real estate mogul but if he performs this one difficult task he can be out from under his thumb forever. And in the process he might sort of do the right thing for once.
His name is Patrick Walker (Tom Hardy, THE DROP), and he’s introduced buying his daughter (Astrid Fox-Sahan, Young Wallander) last minute Christmas gifts at a mini-mart, then being annoyed that the clerk won’t wrap them for him. So we get it when his wife (Narges Rashidi, UNDER THE SHADOW) won’t let him come over. (I’m unclear if this starts on Christmas Eve, actual Christmas, or what.)
It’s filmed in Wales, but set in an unnamed American metropolis that has a bit of the imposing gloom of a Gotham City or THE CROW’s Detroit, the grime of THE RAID’s Jakarta, the visual detail of YEAR OF THE DRAGON’s Chinatown, and the brazen hyperviolence of PREDATOR 2’s Los Angeles. I’ve heard a few people compare this to SIN CITY, and it looks much more real and literal than that, but there’s definitely some of that pulpy exaggeration, including cars that look normal but seem to run on rocket engines. There’s a painterly look to some of it (cinematographer: his usual guy, Matt Flannery) that reminds me of those days I miss when it was more important for movies to look cool than real, when an artificial-looking shot could be praised for its style instead of burned at the stake for cinema sinning. I don’t care if this uses the devil’s computer generated imagery or not – it manages to have real grit and grain while reminding me of the days of soundstages and matte paintings. I will always believe that it is cool for a movie to look cool. It’s just how I was raised.
I guess I had to bring that up now because I have an inkling that at least a few of my fellow action hardcores have objected to the absolute knock-you-on-your-ass truck chase and shootout near the beginning, on account of they’re moving so fucking fast and the feats and camera moves are so spectacular that you can sense there’s some type of digital stuff going on somewhere, somehow. For me it’s one of the most gut-tightening non-MAD-MAX vehicle chases I’ve seen in years. A crew of young people in fluorescent light-up masks have stolen a semi and are tearing through streets and highways with the back door swinging open and various cop cars on their ass. The kids come up with this idea to throw a washing machine into the windshield of a cop car, and I don’t know about you, but I laughed. A good action movie moment. Then they get away and we stay behind with the police cruiser as other officers (including Timothy Olyphant [A PERFECT GETAWAY] as Vincent) arrive to find their friend crushed. Then the doom sinks in. Fun’s over.
(idea: recut that whole sequence to “Neutron Dance”)
The washing machines were full of cocaine, and the heist was a desperate ploy by Charlie Beaumont (Justin Cornwell, JINGLE JANGLE: A CHRISTMAS JOURNEY) to get his girlfriend Mia (Quelin Sepulveda) out of debt from stealing a car belonging to douchey neck-tattooed Triad boss Tsui (Jeremy Ang Jones, THE OUTPOST). But while they’re making the drop off some other guys in demonic hockey masks storm in and massacre Tsui and all his men. Charlie escapes but his face is seen on a security camera, which is a problem for his dad, and Walker’s boss, Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker, BLOODSPORT), who’s running for mayor. So Walker’s mission is to find where Charlie ran to and keep him safe from the gangsters who think he killed Tsui and the cops with their separate grudges.
Walker gets dropped from his case, all the better to chase the kid, sometimes with reluctant help from his younger, by-the-book-er partner Ellie (Jessie Mei Li, LAST NIGHT IN SOHO). Meanwhile Mia tries to get fake passports from her uncle Raul (Luis Guzmán, CROCODILE DUNDEE II), which is really good news because it means there’s gonna be a scene where Tom Hardy interrogates Luis Guzmán. This is what movies are for. How is this the first time?
Tsui’s mother (Yeo Yann Yann, ILO ILO) is just called “Tsui’s Mother” in the credits, but Ellie says her name is Clarice Fong, and she’s clearly a powerful gangster who “traveled halfway around the world to identify my son.” She arrives in town surrounded by serious, scary motherfuckers ready to enact cold-blooded vengeance on her behalf. One sign that this is the type of action movie I love is that one of these henchpeople immediately catches your eye by having cool blond hair under a hoodie under a leather jacket and getting a big entrance where she gets out of a car right after Fong and they walk to face each other and just nod. Later she nimbly jumps off a motorcycle in traffic and causes some trouble. She never has dialogue or even a name, she’s just “the assassin,” played by MMA fighter (and stunt double for Kristen Wiig in MACGRUBER) Michelle Waterson. Any time she appears you know somebody’s gonna get fucked up, building to a long one-on-one with Walker, and no, it does not seem unfair that she’s a woman fighting a beefy brawler dude. He seems like the underdog. I’m not saying it’s as good as the Mad Dog fight in THE RAID, but it has that kind of energy. An instant classic.
I’m a Tom Hardy partisan, and this has what you want from a Tom Hardy role: a tough guy accent, lots of belligerent grunting and muttering, numerous expressions and lines and sounds that are really funny and probly wouldn’t be the way anybody else would do them.
Also it’s a very physical role, even using some of his martial arts experience. Most of the action is chaotic, disorienting, even impressionistic at times, but it has a rhythm and momentum to it the carries you along and makes it exhilarating. The action designer/stunt coordinator is Jude Poyer, and I noticed the second unit director was FRONTIER(S) director Xavier Gens, both veterans of Evans’ show Gangs of London (as are many of the people here).
I think this is a pretty compelling take on familiar story elements, if overly convoluted for its relative simplicity, but I understand people being less into it than me. What’s undeniable is that Evans catapults his numerous factions of criminals into a high volume of absolute top shelf mayhem. There are little bits like when Walker throws a guy head first through the little window on a door, then the door swings open while he’s still hanging on it…
…as well as epic, escalating bloodbaths like what happens when he tracks Mia to a dance club but she doesn’t want to go with him and then the corrupt cops show up and then the Triads show up and then her friends show up and then other cops show up. He’s sliding across the floor (the RISKY BUSINESS maneuver), does a flying drop kick out of nowhere, uses a metal pipe like a sword, Mia uses a champagne bucket and bottle as weapons, then steals a guy’s hatchet and goes to town. We get shots looking up through a glass floor, people getting sliced and diced and tossed over balconies and down stairs, and that’s all before it turns into HEAT for a while. I love how the battle moves through various corners and tunnels of the club and then back onto the street and when they get away we stay behind with the assassin and can hear bullets still popping off in multiple directions, little deadly skirmishes still going on that we don’t even have to know about.
By the way, if not for the massacre, that cover charge of five bucks would be a good deal for getting into Club Medusa! Especially considering the professionalism of the DJ to keep the beats bumping the whole time (unless that’s the score by Evans’ usual composer Aria Prayogi).
The other in-itself-more-exciting-than-the-entirety-of-the-average-action-movie sequence is in the exact opposite setting – instead of the lights and artifice of a huge dance club in the city it’s a small, rustic cabin in the woods, where Evans and Poyer manage to find even more varieties of thrilling cinematic savagery. In a just world this would be in contention for sound design awards considering its symphony of slashings, bodies and structures being torn apart by bullets, blood splorching and splishing and sssissssing. You’re in the middle of it, all around you are sounds of panting, yelling, grunting, screaming, feet stomping, people being shot and kicked and thrown through walls and windows, heads banged against metal and wood and glass. And most of all the gunfire – this kinda seems like Evans’ version of HARD BOILED level overkill, but I like that Evans does not take the “bullet ballet” approach. There is no grace here. This is barbarity.
That said, John Woo and heroic bloodshed must’ve been on his mind. There’s a bond between enemies (Fong and Beaumont have a solemn conversation about their kids), a hospital assassination, and of course all the characters are taking advantage of an all-you-can shoot bullet special throughout.
I don’t think it’s fair to hold HAVOC up to THE RAID, but also, honestly, I don’t think it makes out too terribly in that comparison. I prefer the more martial arts based action of the former, and its compact-as-a-god-damn-diamond plot is more unusual and more successful at what it’s doing than this collection of crime movie tropes. But not for one second does this feel like a watered down, Hollywood-ized Gareth Evans. The action soars far beyond any non-WICK American output, feeling more of a piece with his associate Timo Tjahjanto’s Indonesian Netflix masterpieces. And yet it’s not a copycat, it’s doing its own thing with its high-production-value setting and technique, and by being a vehicle for Hardy’s character-actor-in-a-leading-man-role theatrics; sweating, grunting, doing an accent and being a fuck up but showing in his eyes that he feels his failure deep and wants desperately to get one important thing right.
Three of the central characters are largely defined by blowing it as parents. Fong’s version of making it up to her kid is making the wrong person suffer for his death. Beaumont’s version is (SPOILER) impulsively jumping in front of the bullets meant for his son. Our hopes for the future are for Charlie and Mia to get the fuck out of this godforsaken city (and country), and for Walker’s daughter to not have to think about him too much. I like the bleak subversiveness of offering up the type of story where our protagonist usually makes some small gesture to redeem himself in the eyes of his kid and/or wife, then never even letting him see them.
In the last moments (LAST MOMENTS SPOILER), when Ellie says she’ll “bring it” to his daughter I thought for a second she meant she found some cache of money, but of course his wife has already rejected that sort of thing, and all Ellie really meant was the shitty toys Walker bought the kid for Christmas. His last line that he doesn’t want to ruin her Christmas is a grimly humorous admission of his own loserdom. And yet he’s doing something less glamorous but more honorable than going out in a blaze of glory: he’s turning himself in, no longer going around committing more crimes to get away with previous crimes, like most of the other characters in the movie. That he has the dignity of taking responsibility for his actions is not a silver lining, but maybe a sickly, piss-colored one, like yellow street lights on grey snow in the aftermath of a gun massacre.
April 30th, 2025 at 3:16 pm
Vern, you stay killin this shit. I still haven’t seen SINNERS, but ACCOUNTANT and this are also on my list. I can’t match the pace of your watching, let alone your reviewing. Respect!