‘Havoc’ review: Can Netflix’s Tom Hardy vehicle sustain its visual chaos?

A generic cops-and-drug-dealers saga infused with occasional chaos, Gareth Evans’ Havoc is a decent time, despite its plateauing excess. The long-delayed Tom Hardy vehicle — it completed production in 2021 — has just enough by way of visual panache to set it apart from the usual crop of forgettable, straight-to-streaming action.

With a story that’s nothing to write home about, Evans relies on the action chops he brought to modern Indonesian martial arts classics The Raid and its sequel, The Raid 2: Berandal. However, he does so without even the semblance of soul that made those movies tick. At the center of Havoc is Tom Hardy’s Walker, a gruff, grunting, down-on-his-luck American lunk — a delightful stock type in which the English actor specializes — an outcast cop in the pocket of a crooked politician.

The film gestures towards an inner life we never really see, rendering Walker a physical presence first and foremost. Then again, given how Hardy zigzags between a sad-sack lowlife and a Terminator-esque destroyer at the drop of a hat, the resultant performance is often delightful, despite containing little depth. It’s also just functional enough to support the movie’s sudden bursts of energy during its action set pieces — the thing Evans is best known for, and the element of Havoc that makes it watchable. 

What is Havoc about?

Using introductory voiceover from Hardy’s Walker, Havoc attempts to frame itself as a film about choices and their consequences, albeit without elaborating on what the hell he’s talking about. Walker is a homicide detective who once worked a drug beat, and he’s now on the outs with his former squadmates, led by Timothy Olyphant’s no-nonsense Vincent. Flashes of Walker’s past clue us in on the fact that… something happened, and the brief image of a bloodied hoodlum hints that this “something” was violent in nature. However, the details and ripple effects of this incident don’t come to light until well into the movie’s 105-minute runtime.

Thankfully, this vague character introduction is swiftly interrupted by a high-octane truck chase in the dead of night, during which Vincent and his crew try to hunt down a troupe of drug dealers. The who’s-who is, once again, only clarified in retrospect — a running theme throughout Havoc, making it hard to get invested — but it features a surprising amount of blood and violence for a straightforward car chase. If you’ve ever wondered what a washing machine could do to a human torso, well, wonder no more.

This high-speed pursuit dovetails into a larger inciting incident, when the absconding hoodlums — young couple Charlie (Justin Cornwell) and Mia (Quelin Sepulveda) — escape just in time to rendezvous with their Chinese Triad boss. However, a shootout ensues, leaving Charlie and Mia’s employer dead, and sending the duo on the run as prime suspects.

It just so happens that Charlie is connected to a powerful mayoral candidate, Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker), who has some mysterious leverage over Walker and puts him to work to solve the case — extra-legally, if necessary — causing Walker  to seek the help of his straight-laced, rookie partner Ellie (Jessie Mei Li). Meanwhile, the aforementioned Triad Boss is laid to rest by his fearsome mother (Yeo Yann Yann) who flies in from China to cause chaos of her own. Her presence is commanding, though it’s also meant to introduce subtext about difficult parenthood that never really goes anywhere. Walker is a careless father who leaves his Christmas shopping too late, but beyond a fleeting mention of his daughter, we’re never really made privy to his family life. Similarly, Beaumont’s status as a father is brought up numerous times as well, though none of these nominal connections yields anything resembling a thematic undercurrent.

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If it sounds like these numerous spinning plates add up to a Hollywood crime drama pastiche, that may not be an accident. For better or worse, Havoc doesn’t feel overly concerned with replicating reality as it truly exists. Rather, it unfolds within a specific and often stylized cinematic reality that features familiar genre hallmarks, forming a solid enough foundation for the action to ensue. 

Where exactly does Havoc take place?

From a distance, you’d be forgiven if you confused Havoc with a parody of a Hollywood procedural. The film was largely shot in Evans’ native Wales, and features a number of British actors (starting with co-leads Li and Hardy) playing American cops with flimsy American accents. Then again, there’s a lack of specificity as to where the movie is actually set.

It unfolds in what appears to be an archetypal American city — not unlike Batman’s fictitious Gotham — where crime and law enforcement roam the streets in equal measure, and everyone talks like they’ve watched one too many gangster pictures from the 1940s. Hardy’s usually unplaceable American accent is an oddly perfect fit for a story seemingly set in Generica. However, a major downside is that no one really has a sense of identity, or a relationship to the spaces around them. They enter scenes as if walking onto a set. They speak their lines, and exeunt.

However, this fictional metropolis is rendered in eye-popping style, despite its rote and familiar façade. It may be a stereotype of an American city, just real enough to be convincing, but Evans and cinematographer Matt Flannery render its shapes and shades akin to a toned-down Sin City. Much of the film unfolds in the dead of night, with dark surfaces interrupted by bright light sources that are visible, but which barely seem to illuminate anything but the characters themselves.

The constant downpour of rain enhances the movie’s grainy texture, making it a treat to look at, even though it’s a movie you can seldom connect with. This visual tapestry also helps enhance the action choreography, not only by disguising its contours but by giving it the feel of a moving comic book. 

The action in Havoc works, even if little else does.   

Havoc is not The Raid, nor is trying to be, so viewers shouldn’t go in expecting lengthy hand-to-hand fight scenes. Instead, it’s a film of comical gunfire (even pistols have the infinite rat-tat-tat of submachine guns),  copious blood squibs, and broken bones.

Rather than the dance-like choreography of The Raid, when Havoc does switch into action mode — albeit far too rarely — the fights often involve people wailing on each other, throwing things at each other, and turning enemies into Swiss cheese using endless streams of bullets.  Evans knows exactly when to (and when not to) cut away, so each lengthy action scene is meticulously carved and has a rhythmic flow. The camera charges in and out to capture lumbering bodies in motion and vehicles about to crash into one another. It’s incredibly fun when it decides to be.  

Unfortunately, it’s also a film with little sense of escalation. Once you’ve seen a handful of its action beats unfold, you may as well have seen them all. Not every genre movie needs to be inventive, but Havoc rarely feels born of the same cinematic mischief that gave us the jaw-dropping adrenaline spikes of The Raid and The Raid 2, films that started at an 11 and skyrocketed from there. In Havoc,  the explosive initial truck chase has the same energy as each subsequent, long-take fistfight. There’s a  lack of stylistic evolution, of rising physical and emotional stakes, and of increasingly testing  endurance thresholds — both the characters’ and the audiences’ — leading to a repetitive feeling, despite no two scenes being alike.

If some of the movie is purposefully generic, other parts are less intentionally so. This ensures that Havoc ends up in an experiential no-man’s-land, where Hardy is the biggest reason to watch the movie, but even he feels short-changed by the material.  

Havoc premieres on Netflix April 25.