Havoc Is An Action Movie For Action’s Sake
A no-holds-barred fightfest from an expert.
Imagine the most hard-boiled action movie you can think of. Who does it star? Definitely a proven actor, probably someone better known for a big franchise. Ideally, two. There have to be a few star cameos, maybe from some Star Wars alumni. Finally, you need a director who has trained their entire career for a movie like this, a filmmaker who has lived and breathed action movies from beginning to end.
That movie is Havoc, Gareth Evans’ latest Netflix movie that has just enough plot to keep things interesting while focusing on what really matters: hugely ambitious, high-octane action sequences with the creativity of a slasher movie but the audacity of a Mission Impossible. It’s a curious case of a film, but you can’t argue with the results.
Gareth Evans is best known as the director of The Raid, but with Havoc he’s able to completely let loose. And loose is definitely the keyword: the setting of the movie is never more specific than “America,” which is nevertheless a feat when half the cast is British, the writer/director is Welsh, and everything was filmed in Wales. So as much as you may love Tohm ‘Ardy’s Cockney accent, it’s nowhere to be seen here.
In Havoc, Hardy is Walker, a cop who is pulled every which way by all sorts of factions, but is still trying his best, something we see in one of his first scenes where he buys Christmas gifts for his daughter at a gas station, and then has to buy a newspaper so he can wrap them. He’s dealing with the aftermath of a narcotics deal gone wrong, meaning he has to deal with the gangsters who were slighted, the politician he owes (Forest Whitaker), and even his own fellow cops (Timothy Olyphant.)
Walker is by no means a hero, he’s just trying to find a way out of his past circumstances and his past mistakes. Unfortunately, the only way out is through a slew of violent encounters he’s forced to fight through, and his friends and allies, like his partner Ellie (Shadow and Bone’s Jessie Mei Li) or henchman Johnny (Fallout’s Xelia Mendes-Jones.)
Calling Havoc “action-packed” would be an understatement — it’s “action-stuffed.”
Needless to say, this is a movie with a hefty body count, but it’s not all just shoot-em-up dispatching of enemies. The care and craft taken in the action sequences extends to the murders themselves, with gnarly and gory moments that felt more fit for a Saw movie than a crime thriller.
But far and away, the highlight of this movie is the fight choreography. Every fight scene would be the climactic final fight of a lesser movie, but here it’s just the middle of the first act. The stuntmen are world-class, the sound design is brutal, and the cam is shakier than the final scene of a found-footage movie.
With Havoc, what you see is what you get: non-stop fight scenes with just enough plot to keep you emotionally invested. It may not have a setting or much worldbuilding, but that doesn’t matter — you’re there to watch Tom Hardy, well, wreak havoc.
