Havoc

Having been in the works since 2021, but reshoots, strikes and schedules have delayed it till now, is the netflix movie Havoc. It is the latest frenetic action film directed by Gareth Evans, the man behind The Raid films and Netflix folk horror Apostle. 

Filmed in Wales but set in a generic American city, Tom Hardy is Walker; a grizzled, brute of a policeman trying to make amends to his daughter and his city. A drug deal gets busted and this annoys the wrong people, setting up a tangled web of gangsters, bent cops and crooked politicians all out to try and mop up the pieces. In amongst this maelstrom the crooked politician in question Lawrence Beaumont, the always good value Forest Whitaker, hires Walker to rescue his kidnapped son. 

This moody, convoluted mess of a plot exists to pit many warring factions against each other and watch havoc unleashed on a grand scale. It starts off with a disorientating car chase, the one highlight being a washing machine thrown in someones face, and it sadly does not get any better from there. Aside from the beautiful hand to hand carnage in a nightclub involving a well cast Timothy Olyphant, it is just incessantly mindless and increasingly boring. Buckets of blood, bullets galore, and even a house falling on Tom Hardy do not enliven this drab affair. Plus the CGI city looks oddly out of focus and fuzzy, and is reminiscent of the distracting de-aging done in Scorsese‘s The Irishman. 

Surprisingly mindless, cliche ridden and, dare I say it, dull fare from the man who brought us the balletic chaos of The Raid – a disappointment. 

4/10