Gareth Evans didn’t exactly set out to reinvent the wheel with Havoc, he just wants to see it catch fire and careen off a freeway overpass with Tom Hardy clinging to the hood. On the surface, it seems like a homecoming for the director of The Raid and its sequel (widely considered to be among the best action films of the past 15 years): an unapologetically over-the-top crime story delivered with copious amounts of carnage, the kind of film where you might instinctively check your ribs for bruises, just in case the sheer volume of blunt force trauma made it through the screen. And in that sense, Evans delivers, but the connective tissues leaves much to be desired, resulting in an experience that’s too messy to be great, but just stylized enough to be worth the ride.
Hardy, channeling what seems to be equal parts Mad Max and a weary Home Depot manager on Christmas Eve, plays Walker, a crooked narcotics officer tasked with tracking down the son of an equally crooked politician (Forest Whitaker) when the kid runs afoul of the local Triad crime bosses. This is a character Hardy could play in his sleep: gravel-voiced, menace emanating from every pore, but with the slightest flicker of humanity lurking beneath the surface. Like the majority of corrupt cops depicted onscreen, he’s haunted by past choices and trying to adhere to his own moral compass, even as it spins wildly out of control.
The plot, such as it is, unspools in pieces, driven less by narrative logic than by geography. Havoc is a film about moving from one hallway to the next, one hideout to the next, one floor above or below where someone is waiting with a machete or a submachine gun. Characters are introduced with a few lines of exposition before they’re absorbed into the mayhem, and motivations blur into background noise. The dialogue is utilitarian, often barely audible beneath the sound of shattering glass and echoing gunfire. But none of that seems to matter much, as Evans seems less concerned with telling a story and more focused on immersing viewers in a world of unchecked violence.
And when the film leans into that violence, it’s undeniable. Evans remains one of the most gifted action directors working today, and Havoc gives him ample space to flex. A mid-film nightclub massacre might conjure comparisons to John Wick, but this is far messier than the precise, almost balletic choreography of the Keanu Reeves-led franchise. Here, there are so many bodies and so much blood that it flirts dangerously close to absurdity, with bullet-riddled corpses flying through furniture like crash-test dummies. It’s that sense of escalation, almost ludicrous in its relentlessness, that gives Havoc its pulse, beginning as a relatively grounded crime thriller before spiraling into something closer to carnage-as-spectacle.
But then the film veers back into its muddled conspiracy, and the adrenaline all but evaporates. The screenplay (also by Evans) wants to say something about corruption and institutional rot, but the ideas are so thinly sketched and aggressively undercut by cliché that they barely register. Whitaker, ever the consummate professional, tries to inject some gravitas, while Timothy Olyphant shows up to do his smirking menace routine, which remains as watchable as ever, but both characters feel more symbolic than substantial. Aside from Hardy’s brooding protagonist, Jessie Mei Li’s uniformed rookie officer has the closest thing to a recognizable arc, but even she gets repeatedly pushed to the background in favor of more blood and bullets.
In the end, Havoc doesn’t quite cohere as a story, but as a vehicle for pure, unrelenting action, it mostly succeeds. Those who appreciate the rhythm of well-executed violence, and don’t mind the excess that comes along with it, will find more than enough to satisfy. Like its protagonist, the film is battered and more than a little confused, but keeps pushing forward, determined to get through one more fight.