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For roughly the first half of its running time, Havoc’s title is generic, verging on meaningless. Then, around 50 minutes in, a little past halfway through, it becomes perfectly apt. This is not accomplished through a perfect crystallization of the movie’s themes or a well-placed titular line. (Those work better around the two-thirds mark, anyway.) It is accomplished through genuine havoc. Writer-director Gareth Evans, who has been missing from feature films for seven years (off doing Gangs Of London), spends the first chunk of the movie assembling a broad crime movie around the Venomous presence of Tom Hardy, slurring his way through a weary, slushy Christmas Eve. There is some action—specifically a wild, color-smeared opening vehicle chase that features a refrigeration unit being chucked from a truck at an unlucky cop car—but it’s not until a spectacular melee at a club that the man who made The Raid and its sequel truly re-emerges, bearing blades, guns, metal poles, bare knuckles, and various makeshift props.
Do the reasons for this battle royale, which feels like it has at least as many sides as a tabletop gaming die, really matter? Detective Walker (Hardy) just wants to get through his shift with his new and likely temporary partner Ellie (Jessie Mei Li), then stop by to see his semi-estranged daughter and extremely estranged wife inappropriately late on Christmas Eve, possibly bearing the finest convenience-store gifts money can buy. But he’s caught in a seemingly never-ending crossfire when the city’s corrupt mayor (Forest Whitaker) enlists him to find and save his own estranged kid Charlie (Justin Cornwell), who’s a major suspect in the murder that has enraged a local crime boss (Yeo Yann Yann). Now Charlie is on the run with his girlfriend Mia (Quelin Sepulveda), and the mayor has leverage over Walker thanks to his knowledge of a gruesome incident involving fellow officer Vincent (Timothy Olyphant) and some other shady cops. One would not be surprised to learn there are further connections between the cases afoot. It’s a big city but also, in a sense, a pretty underpopulated one.
The city in question goes unnamed; it’s a scuzzy American metropolis somewhere between Cardiff, Wales (where at least some of the movie was shot) and Sin City (the comic book and movie, not the real Vegas). Evans embraces a distended and heightened reality, using fake digital grain and splotches of Christmas-light color against a perpetual coating of snow to recall the monochrome-with-highlights look of that Frank Miller/Robert Rodriguez collaboration, even if the characters aren’t quite so grotesque. For a while, that lack of extra-pulpy stylization makes the movie potentially off-putting; it’s cartoony but not drawn by an expert cartoonist, and apart from Hardy doing his mumbly-gangster-accent thing (and Whitaker possibly riffing on New York City’s own doofus Eric Adams), the characters aren’t striking enough to pass as memorable caricatures.
Just wait, though. There’s plenty of viscera before Havoc really pops off at the club, but that’s the point where Evans fully recommits to making a gonzo action movie, not just a crime programmer with some extra gore. Assassins, henchmen, major players, and relative innocents jostle together as the camera whips around to keep pace with all the brutality, people flying and sliding in and out of the mobile frame. There’s a bit with a champagne bottle in a bucket that deserves a standing ovation, but happens too fast to get one. If Hong Kong action movies and their American equivalents are like ballet, this is somewhere between a rave and a circus.
Havoc isn’t just this single action sequence. There’s also a second one at the end. Seriously, though: Can 20 minutes or so of brutally inventive action really prop up a whole movie? In this case, yes. Havoc doesn’t reach the mayhem-as-characterization heights of John Wick or the Asian films that clearly inspire Evans, but it does turn its gnarly spectacle into a kind of absurd redemption for the flatness of its characters. In motion and in aggregate, these pawns running around a big fake board become a part of something greater. All the bloodletting, for example, makes Ellie look all the more decent; just look at how few people she ever attacks with a machete. (Olyphant, on the other hand, may be too laconic for these frenzied environs.) Evans hasn’t exactly reinvented himself here, but he has jolted his career making turbo-charged splatter-action back to life.
Director: Gareth Evans
Writer: Gareth Evans
Starring: Tom Hardy, Jessie Mei Li, Justin Cornwell, Quelin Sepulveda, Forest Whitaker, Yeo Yann Yann
Release Date: April 25, 2025 (Netflix)
