Havoc (dir. Gareth Evans)

by Jack Martin | Apr 25, 2025

Certificate: 18

Running Time: 105 mins

UK Distributor: Netflix

UK Release Date: 25 April 2025

WHO’S IN HAVOC?

Tom Hardy, Forest Whitaker, Timothy Olyphant, Justin Cornwell, Jessie Mei Li, Yeo Yann Yann, Xelia Mendes-Jones, Serhat Metin, Quelin Sepulveda, Luis Guzmán, Sunny Pang, Michelle Waterson, Richard Pepper, Tony Parker, Megan Lockhurst

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Gareth Evans (director, writer, producer), Tom Hardy, Gufran Khan, Ed Talfan and Aram Tertzakian (producers), Aria Prayogi (composer), Matt Flannery (cinematographer), Sara Jones and Matt Platts-Mills (editors)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A cop (Hardy) infiltrates a corrupt criminal underworld…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON HAVOC?

Even a seasoned action filmmaker like Gareth Evans isn’t immune from experiencing heavy production headaches. The Welsh director, best known for The Raid and its sequel, spent a whopping four years piecing together his latest film Havoc, which began shooting in 2021 – just as the world was coming out of the pandemic – but scheduling issues and the 2023 industry strikes initially prevented some necessary reshoots to be shot, further delaying the already heavily-delayed movie.

After going through all that, you’d hope for Evans’s sake that the movie turned out good enough to justify its difficult road to completion. However, while it certainly has its moments, Havoc causes an entirely different kind of headache, one that leaves you more than a little nauseous from its constant grittiness and unpleasant nihilism.

Havoc follows seasoned police detective Walker (Tom Hardy) in an undisclosed crime-ridden city, which appears to be equal-parts New York, Chicago, an unrendered Grand Theft Auto game, and Gotham City if Bruce Wayne never became Batman. Unbeknownst to many, Walker is also part of a crooked gang of cops led by fellow officer Vincent Crowley (Timothy Olyphant) but is haunted by a recent incident that left an undercover cop dead. Nonetheless, he is determined to serve, especially when he’s tasked by mayoral candidate Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker) to track down his estranged son Charlie (Justin Cornwell), who’s on the run from Triad gangsters after being in the wrong place at the wrong time when a drug deal is interrupted by armed killers.

As you can probably already tell, Evans’s script is hardly revolutionary with its ideas and themes. It is a very stock crime movie narrative, complete with scenes of Hardy’s gruff detective arguing with his superiors about their impending case, interactions with younger and more naïve cops who lack the world-weariness of their partners, and plenty of moments where corrupt officers constantly act smug and arrogant, though that may just be the permanent smarmy look across Timothy Olyphant’s face here. The dialogue is pretty bad, spelling out characters’ backstories with clunky exposition and offering little to no insight into who they actually are beyond their designated attributes, which makes it difficult to establish an emotional connection with anyone, even the morally conflicted hero. Oh, and it’s also a Christmas film for some reason, so there’s a touch of Shane Black thrown in for good measure as well.

But where the film does excel is, of course, the action. Anyone who’s seen his previous work will know that Evans is an extremely talented filmmaker with a sharp eye for brutal fight choreography, and Havoc extends that fact as he injects some truly gnarly and raw stunt work into numerous scenes that are all about which enemies Hardy and his few allies will come up against next. The bulk of it comes in around the start of the second half, after a slightly more grounded beginning where many of the script problems are unfortunately apparent, and from then on, the movie becomes a relentless onslaught of on-screen carnage, as characters are shot to smithereens by heavier gunfire than in most straightforward war movies, others are killed with sharp hooks, and in one case someone is harpooned with a fishing gun. Evans makes it feel ever more painful just from watching all of it, for as in The Raid movies, you really do feel every bone being snapped, every bullet wound piercing through the skin, every throat slashed and beyond, also thanks to the impeccable stunt coordination and heavy sound design.

From a pure action perspective, Havoc is impressively done, but sadly not enough to truly compensate for all its many other flaws, script-based or otherwise. The film carries a rather bleak and harsh tone throughout, which can be fine so long as there’s narrative substance to balance it out, but since there really isn’t, it comes off as overly nasty, to where you’re actively uncomfortable with some of the violence being dished out, especially to those who really don’t deserve such a cruel fate. There is also some laughably awful CGI used to create certain highway scenes and car chases, which to a point is understandable as to why they went this route – Havoc was shot on-location in mostly highway-free Wales on a fairly tight budget, so they probably couldn’t do it practically even if they wanted to – but it takes you out of the movie every single time it cuts to vehicles looking straight out of a PS4 game racing along equally fake-looking streets and roads.

Even the action, as great as it can be, becomes tiresome after a short while. At times, it just becomes an onslaught of noise disguised as plot and character development, both of which remain low even as things finally begin to wrap up. It’s a different kind of narrative emptiness to something like Warfare, which also traded characters for pure non-stop carnage, but in that film’s case it was much more about immersing the viewer into that realistic atmosphere rather than providing dramatic substance, and by contrast Havoc takes place in such a heightened yet conventional reality that the lack of character depth is much harder to ignore.

In that regard, Warfare is the stronger display of pure action over narrative cohesion – hell, in terms of recent action movies that inexplicably take place around Christmas, Novocaine is far more enjoyable – but Havoc, despite its heavy and often overwhelming flaws, does contain some pretty hardcore action to satisfy those brutal tastebuds.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Havoc features some impressively gnarly action, as one can expect from filmmaker Gareth Evans, but other than that is largely held back by its stock crime movie script and laughably bad effects, an overly bleak and nasty tone, and a lack of narrative substance to complement its heavy brutality.