AFTER a long hiatus following 2018’s folk horror film Apostle, Gareth Evans returns to the world of crime and action with Havoc, a film that truly lives up to its name, for better or worse.
Evans, more popularly known for the cult favourite Indonesian martial arts duology The Raid and The Raid: Berandal from a decade ago, has shown that he is still at the top of the game when it comes to directing action flicks. However, his skill in taking on drama and writing have inexplicably fallen off hard.
A contrived mess, Havoc concerns a group of thieves led by Charlie Beaumont (Justin Cornwell) stealing washing machines before grievously injuring a narcotics detective following a lengthy vehicle pursuit.
In Evans’ escalatingly convoluted story, Charlie’s group tries to sell the drugs inside the washing machines to Tsui, the son of a powerful triad leader. This too goes awry, as a second group of antagonists with assault rifles and hockey masks show up, leading to Tsui and countless others dying.
Dirty homicide detective Patrick Walker (Tom Hardy) is then tasked by the mayoral candidate of Havoc’s unnamed American city, Lawrence (Forest Whitaker), to find Charlie – his estranged son – before the police and triad get to him.
No Raid revival in sight
Though Evans seems to have put The Raid franchise to bed, most of the writer-director’s fans are still expecting some sort of follow-up to his Indonesian films, which many in movie circles agree started the modern renaissance for martial arts and action films – after 2011’s The Raid, countless action films such as John Wick began to sprout up sharing the same DNA as Evans’ films.
For anyone expecting Evans’ latest to be a spiritual follow-up to The Raid, you can rest easy because Havoc is not that film. That is not to say the film is terrible, but it is as decent as a Netflix film can reasonably get.
It even feels wrong to put Havoc in the same sentence as The Raid, due to the film’s meagre amount of action sequences. Having to stomach the bulk of the film just to savour the two or so slivers of Evans’ signature style of action filmmaking is simply not worth it.
To make matters worse, they are not very long and are spaced far apart, while the best of the two occurs in the third act, taking place in a cabin as Hardy is put through a gauntlet of nameless goons that end with roughly 50 people beaten, knifed, slashed, harpooned and shot to death.
It is a great sequence – a final hurrah true to Evans’ style that only slightly makes up for the rest of Havoc’s story involving generic dirty cops, witless robbers and personality-free crime families.
Havoc is streaming on Netflix.
