“Havoc” Review
Director: Gareth Evans Screenwriter: Gareth Evans Cast: Tom Hardy, Jessie Mei Li, Justin Cornwell, Quelin Sepulveda, Luis Guzmán, Yeo Yann Yann, Timothy Olyphant, Forest Whitaker Distributor: Netflix Running Time: 107 min. MPAA: R
Watching Gareth Evans go from directing the manic masterpiece of The Raid to the familiar street cop grit of Havoc is like having a top-rated chef go from cooking Kobe beef to a Big Mac. On the surface, it looks like a typical dose of fast food. But there’s a great surprise when taking a bite and noticing how juicy he gets with the gushing blood, blunt bullet ballets, and breakneck carnage. It’s still a Big Mac, but served so incredibly rare that the familiar cliches are mostly washed away by the onslaught of incredibly staged violence.
It’s no surprise that the story is the least interesting aspect of the film. Tom Hardy plays the down-on-his-luck detective Patrick, stumbling onto a hornet’s nest of feuding gangs on the streets. There’s no time to think about his estranged family when he’s already swimming in corrupt waters with tycoon Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker), who is currently running for mayor. Patrick’s latest mission is to track down Lawrence’s son, Charlie (Justin Cornwell), who is on the run for killing a top Triad leader. There are even more corrupt cops and vicious assassins thrown into the mix to keep this web of crime as bloody as it is intricate.
The various plotlines don’t matter all that much. You won’t need to worry about keeping track of Beaumont’s many dealings or the multiple betrayals of cops and gangsters. Evans is fully aware that his audience is coming for the frenetic nature of fast-paced gunplay, and he doesn’t disappoint in the slightest. The body count is kept as high as the amount of blood that explodes out of bodies. No scene of brutality falls on the simplistic or routine. The opening car chase, for example, is one where washing machines full of cocaine become weapons of the road. A shootout in a club has the bass cranked high as several hitmen get shot up and gutted with the camera getting so close to the chaos.
I can’t help but feel that Evans drew some inspiration from John Woo, particularly Hard Boiled with its hospital shootout. While Evans might not have the same maddening choreography, he’s got the right spirit of brutality. Case in point, one scene features a triad member, Ching, targeting a hospitalized narcotics detective who knows too much. Ching not only succeeds in his kill but even goes so far as to shoot up the detective’s wife right before shoving her body into the path of a pursuing cop. It’s a viciously uncompromising dose of action with frightening consequences, and it only gets more intense as it continues to the blood-soaked finale.
Havoc proves that Gareth Evans is still a masterful action director, even if his writing doesn’t match his penchant for pulverizing. It’s not as strong as his work on The Raid, where the action informed the story instead of using a script as a lattice for great violence. What’s impressive is how well Havoc’s intense brutality floats above a relatively routine and forgettable tale of drug deals, gang wars, and dirty cops. There’s an incredible whiplash felt when a film like this goes from ho-hum scenes of detectives tracking down clues and associations to exploding with the loudest of action scenes, where I practically broke my neck bolting up when realizing Evans still has some of that nitro-infused fight staging amid this Netflix project.
