Havoc ★★

Released: 25 April 2025 (Netflix)

Director: Gareth Evans

Starring: Tom Hardy, Forest Whitaker

Gareth Evans burst onto the global scene in 2011 with The Raid, a nonstop martial arts action movie which introduced the world to the Indonesian martial art pencak silat and gave us the actors Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim and Yayan Ruhian. It also centred the violence in an unusually unflinching way, showing in great gross close-up detail all the horrible ways various stuntmen can die. Since his return to the UK Mr Evans has been working on the crime TV show Gangs of London, a monster hit spawning many imitators. Originally filmed in 2021 and thanks to a variety of reasons is only getting a release on Netflix now. Havoc is a plain old Hollywood movie, by design (and more on that later), combining Mr Evans’ gift for mayhem with the American fondness for guns. The fight scenes deliver – of course they deliver – but sad to say the rest of the movie is one weary cliché after another.

Walker (Tom Hardy) is a beaten-down cop in a beaten-up American city, called to a dramatic crime scene involving a triad member dead face down in a huge heap of cocaine. The main suspects are quickly identified as Charlie (Justin Cornwell) and his girlfriend Mia (Quelin Sepulveda), who are, unbeknownst to them, under Walker’s protection thanks to the favours he owes Charlie’s politician father (Forest Whitaker). The two youths in love are also being hunted by various triad factions, especially the one led by the dead triad’s mother (Yeo Yann Yann), as well as a group of cops led by Vince (Timothy Olyphant). In the middle of the manhunt Walker’s only friend is naive junior cop Ellie (Jessie Mei Li). So what on earth could possibly happen next?

The main takeaway of this movie is Mia’s excellence as a girlfriend. She can drive a hijacked tractor trailer through a large city without crashing, nimbly defend herself in a nightclub brawl with champagne buckets, meat cleavers or whatever other weapons spring to hand, and keep tears welling in her big eyes as her boyfriend and his dad have some big emotional moments. Ms Sepulveda really ties the whole movie together in ways which should do wonders for her career. The other actors are embodying various crime clichés and do as much as they can with the very little they have to work with. The script is risible (how many times does someone say “that’s on me” or “that’s on you”? Because I ran out of fingers counting) and everything else is serviceable, but that’s kind of like complaining about the bedsheets in a porno. We are all here for the fights, which deliver exactly the kind of over-the-top gory mayhem we have all come to expect from Mr Evans.

And yet. Havoc was one of the biggest film shoots ever in Wales, but most of the visuals are VFX to make it seem like a generic “New York City”. The absence of any actual place there was only solidified when Mr Evans mentioned his inspirations were 1970’s American crime thrillers. What Havoc and all its fakery looks like is a pastiche of the American movies of the nineties ripping off those grimy action thrillers from the seventies. The big centrepiece action sequence takes place in a wooden cabin much like the big finale in LA Confidential, the gross addicts Walker and Ellie are introduced handling bear a strong resemblance to everyone with a small part in The Crow, and Blade Runner continues to be one of the most influential movies ever made.

All of these callbacks and shout-outs would be justified if Mr Evans had found anything fresh, but he just didn’t. Luis Guzman has basically one scene here, just like he did in Out of Sight, but that movie made you feel its settings and personalities in ways Havoc can only dream of. What was so special about The Raid was it took a generic plot (cops having to fight their way out of a trap inch by inch) with a very specific setting that was unfamiliar to Western audiences. And now that his career is established Mr Evans has regressed. Havoc is paint-by-numbers, without the paints.

Two final things: firstly, if I ever see a non-speaking Asian female assassin again, it will be too soon, but at least Michelle Waterson gets to look very cool in this embarrassingly cliched part while doing it. Secondly, the cynical marketing involved in making this a Christmas movie is off the charts.