Havoc ★★★

If there’s one thing working against Gareth Evans’ Havoc, it’s time. There’s a small but passionately warped subset of cinephiles out there for whom a new Evans film will rank as one of the top five most anticipated movie events of the year. I of course include myself in this group, for I still cherish the memory of seeing The Raid in theaters with an audience of fellow genre junkies, our greedy, punchdrunk brains being happily imprinted with gleeful displays of ultraviolence – the likes of which some of us had never seen on the big screen before. 

We waited three years for The Raid 2, a long time made more manageable by the fact it gave us time to catch up with Evans’ first film, Merantau. And when it arrived, The Raid 2  over-delivered. Evans earned his bona fides as one of the great modern action directors, creating set pieces of such frenetic energy, spectacular inventiveness and giddy bloodshed that you knew you were watching an instant classic whose only fault was that it was trying to be too epic.

This was followed by a four year wait for 2018’s Apostle, the first in Evans’ ongoing relationship with Netflix. I adore Apostle, but I know I’m in an even smaller subset with this opinion. It represents a hard pivot into weird folk horror filmmaking for a guy who made his name delivering outrageously choreographed fight sequences. But the Welsh-born Evans got his start in Indonesia, where the line between action and horror is often paper thin. One of his peers is Timo Tjahjanto (he and Evans co-directed a segment in V/H/S/2), an Indonesian director who also has a Netflix deal and who also makes elaborately choreographed, deliriously bloody action films when he isn’t directing Sam Raimi-esque horror films.

Apostle is grim, hyper-stylized, lunatic filmmaking. It’s become a Halloween go-to for me. But it’s far enough afield from The Raid that I can understand if it left some of Evans’ fans jonesing.  The good news arrived only a couple years later, at the start of 2021, when Havoc was first announced. It promised a return to the cops vs. gangsters action that fueled The Raid movies. And the casting news of Tom Hardy, who’s also a producer, seemed an ideal choice.

Well, in a development that’s reminiscent of the saga behind Hardy’s Fury Road, four years after principal photography wrapped, we’re finally getting a look at Havoc. Seven years after Apostle, and eleven years after The Raid 2. This is a different kind of waiting, a different sort of passage of time. In this scenario, anticipation stops building and turns in on itself – into something that works against the film. When you enter the realm of Fury Road delays, the movie has to deliver something special for it to satiate your curdled desires. In the case of Havoc, it’s only a good action movie that has a lot going for it and less than a few strikes against it.

Tom Hardy is indeed well-cast as a dirtbag cop. Immediately it’s a wonder that this is (I believe) his first time playing such a ubiquitous cinematic character. In his first couple of scenes, Hardy’s Walker is repeatedly referred to, in the most sarcastic ways possible, as the world’s greatest dad. We meet him as he talks on the phone to his estranged wife while buying his six-year-old daughter crappy gifts from a hellishly bleak convenience store. It’s a set-up that’s maybe too familiar. As is the fact that Walker just got saddled with a rookie cop (well-played by Jessie Mei Li) as his new, unwanted partner.

The convenience store, like the rest of Havoc’s urban environment, is also reminiscent of other films. The anonymous city gives off strong Gotham City vibes, especially the recent Matt Reeves interpretation, which could be described as Euro-Chicago. Havoc is also an entry in the growing Die Hard subgenre of Christmas-set action movies, though the Xmas ambiance never really shows up. It all feels more like a gloomy springtime in Cardiff, Wales, which is where the movie was primarily shot.

We quickly learn that most of Walker’s problems stem from him being a dirty cop. He did something bad, and it’s been eating away at him, ruining his life. He’s actually part of a small group of dirty cops led by a cheerfully nasty Timothy Olyphant, but he can’t even be friends with them anymore because he isn’t as dirty as they are. Walker doesn’t want anything to do with the dirty cop lifestyle anymore, which includes being a henchman for the mayor, played by Forest Whitaker with his usual open-hearted intensity.

Walker’s chance to escape it all comes when the mayor’s son is involved in a drug deal/heist that turns into a massacre. Among the dead is both a cop and the son of a Chinese crime lord. So two factions are out for blood and Walker makes a deal with the mayor to owe no more debts if he can get his son to safety.

While the trappings may be a little stale, the set-up isn’t bad. It’s lean and unfussy. One of the knocks against The Raid 2, aside from its two-and-a-half hour runtime, is that it’s far more complex than it needs to be in articulating the details and many characters involved in its gang war. Havoc is a brisk 107 minutes and you don’t need a cheat sheet to keep track of what’s happening. Once Walker is on the case, the movie hardly stops to catch its breath and there are enough twists and turns in the story to keep you engaged amidst all the carnage.

Speaking of which, there are at least two bravura set pieces that will make any Evans fan happy they pressed play. I believe all quality movies deserve a theatrical release, but I will say that Havoc, and the films of Timo Tjahjanto (especially When the Night Comes for Us and The Shadow Strays), contain enough instantly replayable moments of gonzo stunt work and playful camera acrobatics that they make a case for being especially suited to the casual ease of streaming’s rewind function. In a perfect world, we’d maybe get four or five of these scenes, but I will say that the ones we do get deliver the goods. After all, most viewers won’t recognize this as a step down in scale and ambition from an 11-year-old movie, but they should recognize it as far better and more accomplished and exciting than, say, The Beekeeper.

The first of these set pieces comes around the halfway point, at a nightclub that looks an awful lot like the one in the centerpiece showdown of The Raid 2. Location similarities aside, it’s got a handful of laugh-out-loud audacious moments, like when the meat cleaver makes its appearance, or when Luis Guzman shoots someone in the head and a screaming character’s face is covered in a geyser of goopy blood. Classic Evans. The second set piece takes place in what could easily double as the cabin from Evil Dead II, and what happens inside of it isn’t far off from Ash doing battle against a horde of deadites. Instead of a chainsaw, we have some impressively effective fishing gear.

These are the kind of scenes that fans of action cinema will admire because they happen very rarely in mainstream movies. Nowadays, very few directors are given the time and budget that will allow for the choreography, care, and multiple camera setups that truly exciting action mayhem requires. Modern action fare is typically filled with “long take” sequences that can deliver on the choreography but is digitally stitched together in a way that is favoring efficiency and fewer camera setups over any attempts at kinetic visual storytelling. 

Evans’ camera, on the other hand, will fall, spin, tilt, and do any number of gyroscopic maneuvers in an effort to capture the intensity and narrative beats of the fight that is unfolding. There’s a reason Evans is also credited as “action editor” on this movie. It’s one of his great talents, using edits to give the action scenes punctuation, the equivalent of commas, periods and exclamation points in a paragraph. It’s very nearly becoming the lost art of action cinema and it’s worth watching Havoc to feel the rush of when all these tools kick into high gear.

There’s always a concern when any action director leaves their home country to ply their trade. In the 1980s and 90s, Hong Kong directors were largely unable to replicate the magic in Hollywood – the rules of the machinery and infrastructure are just too different. Tellingly, Evans has stayed in Wales for his two English-language movies, and you get the sense that he’s building his own crew and still doing things on his own terms, even if he can’t quite replicate the freewheeling scale he was able to achieve in Indonesia. Maybe this is the freedom that Netflix affords: to do things at his own pace, with his own people. What will happen when Tino Tjahjanto takes on a Hollywood franchise film? We’ll find out in August when Nobody 2 arrives.

I’m cautiously optimistic. It’ll be great to see this kind of action on a big screen with an appreciative crowd. But then again, maybe the films of Evans and Tjahjanto feel at home on Netflix because these are exactly the kind of disreputable movies you’d rent from the video store and watch with your friends when the parents weren’t around. Havoc is the cinema of broken bones, car crashes and impalements. It’s cinema of the highest technical order and the lowest moral rectitude. I only hope that I won’t have to wait so long for my next dose.