Havoc - Review

Rating: 3 out of 5

THE pairing of Tom Hardy with The Raid filmmaker Gareth Evans for a high-octane action thriller inspired by the likes of John (Hard Boiled/The Killer) Woo and William (The French Connection) Friedkin felt like a mouthwatering prospect. Alas, new Netflix offering Havoc struggles to hit the heights anticipated.

For sure, there are one or two dazzling action sequences that both pay successful homage to those Evans is seeking to honour, which also maintain the high standards the director set for himself with his Raid movies.

But there's a lot about Havoc that doesn't work. The script, for starters, is awful, whether in the banality of some of the F-bomb strewn dialogue, or in the way that it lets down most of its characters. Hence, a quality ensemble cast, which further includes the likes of Timothy Olyphant, Forrest Whitaker, Justin Cornwell and Jessie Mei Li, struggle to rise above easy stereotypes, or tap into the complexity suggested in the broader story as a whole.

The plot follows a conflicted cop named Walker (Hardy) as he is drawn into an investigation surrounding the gang-style killing of nine people. The subsequent case touches on Walker's past involvement in a shady drug op gone bad and further involves the son (Cornwell) of a corrupt high-ranking politician named Lawrence Beaumont (Whitaker), as well as a Malaysian crime boss (Yeo Yann Yann). It eventually comes down to Walker to rescue Beaumont Jnr from the Malaysians, while keeping one step ahead of the various parties looking to bring him down.

Evans, who was also responsible for the first season of hit Sky TV drama Gangs of London, said he wanted to experiment with genre styles when making Havoc, thereby marrying the hard-edged, character driven style of '70s thrillers like The French Connection and Point Blank with the action-driven approach of Woo's Hard Boiled. He also sought to mix in elements of graphic novel visual style and even computer game elements.

And, to a degree, he's been successful in ticking some of those boxes. The look of the film certainly boasts a graphic novel aesthetic, while some of the action feels immersive in a first-person shooter kind of way. And as he has previously shown with the benchmark setting Raid films, he can certainly trade blows with the best genre filmmakers for delivering eye-catching action.

But Evans falls short in his attempt to emulate the '70s thrillers he has openly referenced. There simply isn't enough time afforded to anyone to really tap into the nuance offered by their character's predicaments. Hardy is reliably solid but it's easier to recall the past performances of his own that this recalls (whether it's Mad Max, Bane, Forrest Bondurant or Tommy Conlon), rather than celebrating another Hardy master-work in its own right.

While Olyphant is afforded nowhere near the screen-time his enigmatic villain deserves, and Whitaker feels like he's pitching his performance to a completely different, character-driven movie and feels like he's wasted his efforts. 

Certainly, his Fisk-style politician hints at more back-story and depth than is ever close to being delivered by Evans' screenplay.

The same shortcomings can be attributed to the likes of Cornwell, whose anguished son is never allowed to explain why he feels so anguished, and to Mei Li, whose dedicated partner to Walker isn't afforded any complexity beyond loyal follower. She could, and should, have been a lot more questioning.

Certainly, Evans is capable of bringing more nuance to his characters, as anyone who has seen The Raid 2 can testify.

But if you're willing to overlook the film's many flaws, then Havoc does at least deliver on its promise of delivering on the action stakes. It's bone-crunching, it's imaginative and it can be exhilarating - even if there are times when the amounts of bullets being fired and the amount of blood being spilled feels overly excessive.

An opening car chase has its moments but an extended sequence inside a nightclub, when Walker faces off against various  enemies while attempting to protect his young charges, is full of breathtaking choreography and ingenious use of weaponry. 

It's up there with the best sequences from the more recent adrenaline-rushes of films like John Wick, Extraction and Atomic Blonde.

A final showdown in and around a lakeside fishing cabin nearly repeats the trick with much inventive gun-play, the improvised addition of a fishing hook and, eventually, a thrilling one-on-one clash between Hardy's brawn and the MMA ferocity of Michelle Waterson's nameless Malaysian assassin.

But once the mayhem has died down and you're left to ponder the success of Havoc as a whole, the film still feels like it should have been a lot better.