Tom Hardy And Gareth Evans Team For A Hyperviolent Shoot ‘Em Up

No one simply fires off one shot in “Havoc,” the new bit of action mayhem from director Gareth Evans. When people aim their weapons here, they unleash an almost impossible torrent of rounds, shooting continuously, the soundtrack turned into a thunderous cacophony of gunfire. When the bullets finally do stop flying, your ears will be ringing. It’s all a bit overwhelming, to the point where Evans’ latest film, which is headed right to Netflix, starts to grow almost inadvertently comedic. By the time a climactic moment arrived where a character pointed an automatic weapon point-blank into someone and fired away while a fountain of blood splashed into their screaming face, I felt an uncontrollable urge to laugh at the violent absurdity of it all. Yes, make no mistake: “Havoc” is violent to the extreme. But this raises a question: how much fun can be had from watching so much senseless violence?

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Evans, who has been working on “Havoc” for years (it actually initially wrapped filming in 2021 before needing some reshoots) is a pro at staging jaw-dropping action, as fans of his “The Raid” movies can tell you. Those are brutal flicks, but there’s a certain amount of pleasure to be had in watching the characters beat the hell out of each other. “Havoc,” however, is so consistently nasty that it left a sour taste in my mouth. While criminals are the main players here, there are a handful of hapless bystanders who get mowed down in brutal fashion — one particularly cruel scene has a completely innocent woman brutally shot to death in a hospital hallway for no real reason other than shock value.

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I don’t want to sound like a killjoy here, but … aren’t action movies supposed to be fun? Not “Havoc.” Evans seems committed to delivering us a bad time here — a film staged mostly in grungy, filthy locations against the bleakest Christmastime setting imaginable. Sure, there’s some enjoyment to be had in watching all this chaos unfold, but yeesh, you might want to lighten up a little, “Havoc.”

As “Havoc” begins, crooked cop Walker (Tom Hardy, doing yet another memorable voice) gets called to the scene of a massacre of some Chinese triad gangsters. After visualizing what happened like Will Graham in “Manhunter”https://www.slashfilm.com/”Hannibal” (a fun concept I was hoping Evans would employ a few more times here instead of immediately abandoning), Walker realizes one of the people involved in the mess is Charlie (Justin Cornwell), the estranged son of corrupt politician Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker). When he’s not (barely) being a cop, Walker moonlights as hired muscle for Beaumont, and soon he’s tasked with trying to find Charlie and his girlfriend Mia (Quelin Sepulveda), who are on the run.

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Seemingly everyone wants to kill these two kids, and no place is safe in the city (the city itself is never named, and it never feels like a real place — there are multiple wide shots that look completely digital and fake, as if everyone was inhabiting Robert Rodriguez’s “Sin City”). Honestly, none of this matters — it’s all table setting so Evans can unleash one violent shootout after another. While hand-to-hand combat was what made the “Raid” movies so thrilling, gunplay is the focus of “Havoc.” And perhaps that’s the problem: watching characters punch and kick each other is exciting; watching characters fire guns over and over again? Not so much.

It certainly doesn’t help that we don’t care about any of these characters. In theory, we should care about Charlie and Mia, since they’re a pair of kids in over their heads and everyone is gunning for them. But the film doesn’t spend enough time with them for us to really give a damn. As for Hardy’s bad cop, there’s some stuff in here about how he’s full of regret and wants to maybe make things right and save his damaged soul, but this is cliched, hoary stuff that we’ve seen in a billion other movies. Hardy is a charismatic actor, and he certainly has the physicality to make all the action scenes work. But there’s absolutely nothing interesting about his character; he’s just a guy who moves from one action set piece to the next with a frown on his face.

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On top of that, a lot of the action that unfolds here is frustratingly disorienting and hard to follow. Evans and cinematographer Matt Flannery are fond of shaking the camera when the action begins, all in the name of conveying the chaos of the moment. But instead of heightening the action it renders it ineffective; it’s hard to get swept up in an action scene if we can’t see what the hell is happening.

In the midst of all this, Hardy is backed up by talented people like Jessie Mei Li, who does what she can with an underwritten part (she’s seemingly the only honest police officer in town), and Timothy Olyphant, who plays a cop even dirtier than Walker. But again: none of these characters amount to much. Evans doesn’t seem interested in people here; he just wants bodies to obliterate in hails of bullets.

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“Havoc” does deserve praise for staging some memorable action beats, especially a huge climax in a dilapidated snowy cabin that build and builds and builds to the point where you’ll feel adrenaline coursing through your body as you watch. But getting there is such a dour, miserable slog that I felt myself deflating as the film went along. 

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To be clear: I love a good, violent action movie as much as the next dude, but you have to give me something more than just one extreme shootout followed by another. Perhaps if the hyperviolence was a little more stylized it would play better. Instead, it’s just ugly stuff repeated in numbing fashion.

By the time “Havoc” ended, I felt as exhausted as Hardy’s beaten and bruised character. I suppose Evans and company deserve some credit for making an action movie that really leans into the brutality, but there’s only so much of that you can put up with before it starts to grow tedious.

/Film Rating: 5 out of 10

“Havoc” is streaming on Netflix April 25, 2025.