HAVOC. The most linear, lowest resistance path to Gareth Evans’ latest is most likely an accidental one. Dropped unceremoniously onto Netflix, where algorithmic manipulation, more than fandom or genuine interest, is intended to steer traffic its way, Havoc would hardly seem positioned for lasting — even fleeting, viral — success. Casual Tom Hardy fans might wander over, further compelled by the presence of Timothy Olyphant and Forrest Whitaker, but I can’t help but wonder how many of them will be put-off by what turns out to be a bone-shattering, blood-drenched, wintry shoot-em-up set against the underbelly of an unnamed American city’s Chinatown. And that wouldn’t be a problem, per se, except that this is a movie for which some of us have been waiting for a very long time and which, either in its execution or its delivery system, may not be getting the treatment it deserves.
To backtrack to something like a logical starting point, Gareth Evans is a Welsh writer/director who, while living in Jakarta, kind of irrevocably changed international action cinema by making The Raid: Redemption (2011) which, along with its 2014 sequel, minted Iko Uwais as a genuine star and opened a lot of intercontinental eyes to possibilities previously unseen in fight films. Evans subsequently shifted gears, got into bed with Netflix and made Apostle (2018), which I can’t remember seeing, if I did; shame on me.
Somewhere in the doldrum day of the mid-pandemic, though, rumors surfaced that Evans was at work on an action movie with Hardy as its star. (This was around the time Hardy started dropping into and winning jiu jitsu competitions.) It was a source of hope in an unhopeful time. But for almost half a decade, the project lingered like a ghost on IMDb pages, taunting us with the possibility of something fresh and new and horrible and violent. And then, wraith-like, it appeared. No fanfare to speak of, very little promotion, though I suppose I hadn’t been looking for it. But there it was among the Hot Frostys and assorted costume dramas, big as life but disquietingly quiet in its arrival.
Cursory research indicates Havoc has been stuck in some new version of studio development hell, delayed by reshoots and strikes after having been principally photographed in 2021, with the current 800-pound gorilla finally having decided to grace us with its presence at this late, rather unceremonious date.
For those of us so long in anticipating it, we’ve gotten most of what we hoped for. The uninitiated will likely not be as pleased.
Hardy plays Walker, a taciturn, muttering homicide detective in high Hardy style, who we learn in the early going is estranged from his wife and young daughter. We’ll come to learn that Walker is also in the pocket of high-powered politician Lawrence Beaumont (Whitaker) and his former narcotics buddy turned heister Vincent (Olyphant). There’s a purloined semi-truck loaded with washing machines (which are, in turn, loaded with cocaine, naturally), a deal gone terribly bad and a whole lot of blood and recriminations flying around.
One of the things so many of us love about The Raid is its almost-entire disregard for exposition (or, by one definition, of narrative storytelling). There’s a little coloring in of the protagonist’s inner life, but really the thing is a 100-minute fight festival, an opportunity for cast and crew to deploy every object in a high-rise as a weapon. It’s a gleeful, cinematically decadent affair, choreographed and shot with equal precision, style and disregard for physical well-being.
Havoc delivers much of the same muscular, acrobatic fun, with even more assault rifles and chests erupting into fountains of gore. It is more of what we want, and with an occasional elevated flourish — the photography of the opening truck sequence, with its impossible boom and dolly shots, springs to mind — to let us know everyone is working with a bigger budget and newer tools. Taken as pure action, it is almost as satisfying as its own progenitors or something like John Wick (2014).
But in attempting to personalize the narrative, to make Walker or any of the youths-in-trouble with whom he is ostensibly aligned into actual people, the pacing falters and we simply don’t have enough emotional material with which to work. Set against the resounding success of Wick, with its fantastical world-building ridiculousness, Havoc stills feels compact and grimy — as it should — but gives us suggestions of a greater ambition that the finished product never quite reaches.
That sense of misplaced striving may only be a product of my own hopes for this movie, for Evans to again redraw the boundaries of cinematic violence; I should probably be happy that it is as good as it is. And in terms of late-night rewatchable durability, I suspect it will prove to be quite good indeed. TVMA. 107M. NETFLIX.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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This article appears in From Garden to Table in the Hall.