Havoc Review

Havoc streams on Netflix beginning Friday, April 25.

There’s something almost curatorial about the violence in Havoc, the new pageant of senselessly spectacular bloodshed from Gareth Evans. The Welsh writer-director of The Raid and its plus-sized sequel doesn’t just expertly choreograph his mayhem. He leads us on a guided tour through it, drawing our eyes exactly where they need to go at every bone-cracking moment. About halfway through this Netflix crime thriller, the characters converge upon a nightclub, the kind Blade or John Wick will often drizzle in the blood of their foolhardy pursuers. Evans films the ensuing free-for-brawl in dizzying whip pans, racing back and forth across the space to catch every body felled by a blade or tossed over railings. His camera moves like a head on a swivel, following the carnage with the hyper-focus of a referee never losing track of the onfield play. To us, it seems to serve up a live sizzle reel of harm and foul.

Though the precision of the fights and East-meets-West bent of the material might suggest otherwise, Havoc is not another quirky Wick imitation. (Small favors there – that trend is losing its luster a decade out.) Instead, Evans has made a rather mercenary and familiar underworld saga, and then goosed it with his speciality for virtuosic brutality. Take out the excessive combat scenes and there wouldn’t be much else to distinguish it from other direct-to-streaming punch-ups.

Even the location is generic, a glowing placeholder. The story unfolds over Christmas in an unidentified metropolis ridden with crime and riddled with bullets; the city is East meets West, too, in the sense that it alternately (if vaguely) resembles New York and Los Angeles, as played by a digitally touched up Cardiff. Our entry point into this world is Walker Mackey (Tom Hardy), a hangover with a badge. Hardy’s presence is about all that tethers Havoc to human interest; like almost every actor here, he’s playing a stock genre type: the cynical lifer cop burnt out by his bad decisions. But armed with his stocky frame, low mutter, and air of weary machismo, the Mad Max: Fury Road star exudes his usual, gruff credibility. He’s the rare modern A-lister you can buy as an actual brute.

A coke deal has gone wrong, as coke deals in the movies usually do. A spoiled Triad scion lays glassy-eyed in his den of vices. Havoc follows the pursuit of the patsies, a couple of scared twentysomethings falsely fingered for the murder; they go on the run from a vengeful Chinese syndicate and a tight-knit task force of dirty cops, plus at least one virtuous rookie who just wants to solve the crime, not avenge it. None are characters worth naming. Havoc keeps throwing more into the mix, like a corrupt mayor played by Forest Whitaker and Timothy Olyphant as the leader of the bad officers who used to call Walker an accomplice.

Evans is virtually unmatched in the field of staging savage show- and beatdowns that seem chaotic but are obviously, actually very carefully blocked, and Havoc comes to life whenever he gets in touch with that skill. Even 14 years on, the director is still riding the high of the Indonesian tower-of-doom bloodfest The Raid, a movie whose power lay in its ruthlessly single-minded pursuit of awe. No characters, really. No plot, or motivation. Just bloody survival, floor by floor.

Havoc is not as pure as that impeccably orchestrated instant classic of adrenaline-junkie thrills. Like the director’s second Raid movie, it clutters up the bombastic, lizard-brained carnage with too much gangland intrigue. The story he’s concocted is mere scaffolding for the action, but Evans doesn’t seem to realize that. We know, instinctively, by muscle memory of muscular genre pastiches before it, where things are headed. Will Hardy’s cop redeem himself for the transgression that sours his moods? Please. The only real question is how much collateral damage he’ll leave on his path to absolution.

Savor the moments when everyone stops talking and starts swinging a hook, firing a harpoon, or pumping an armory’s worth of lead into the floor and ceiling. That acrobatic camera – lurching forward to stay in the fray, as dynamic as the doomed martial-arts henchpeople it films – follows the golden rule of showing instead of telling. So does a kinetic opening car chase, only marginally less exciting for having clearly been put together entirely on a computer, in contrast with the best road-rage sequences on Hardy’s resume. So long as Havoc is delivering on the promise of, well, havoc it passes the time. But a more genuinely curated action flick wouldn’t have wasted as much of ours.