‘Havoc’ Review: Tom Hardy Shoots His Way to Redemption in Explosive Netflix Crime Saga from ‘The Raid’ Director Gareth Evans

The action in "Havoc" is too good for there to be so little of it, but there's no denying the fun of watching Tom Hardy blast a hole through a Gareth Evans movie.

The pleasures of Gareth Evans’ long-awaited “Havoc” are fewer and less consistent than die-hard fans might hope from a project they’ve been waiting to see for so many years (principal photography wrapped in the fall of 2021, only for routine reshoots to get postponed until 2024 due to various strikes and scheduling issues), but the best moments of this comically scuzzy crime saga reaffirm why the Welsh director’s work is worth the hype.

And by “the best moments,” I’m not talking about the clenched dialogue scenes that help to prop up a convoluted gang war between the Chinese mafia and the city’s corrupt mayor — a conflict that feels needlessly convoluted even before Tom Hardy, of all people, volunteers to interpret it for us. 

No, I’m talking about the hyper-ballistic car chases and shootouts that all of the movie’s yapping exists to justify. While the action sequences here aren’t as extreme or sustained as those in Evans’ previous fare, they bristle and burst with the same frenzied physicality that elevated “The Raid” from an ordinary beat-em-up to an orgiastic carnival of violence.

Netflix’s emphasis on passive viewing makes the streamer an ill-fitting home for a film so eager to grab you by the throat, but not even the Tudum! of it all can fully diminish the impact of a cop being crushed to death by a washing machine full of coke or a Triad getting harpooned in the chest at point-blank range. And the two seconds in which it seems like Luis Guzmán is about to go full Iko Uwais on a nightclub full of gangsters? Well, the mere idea of that hits harder than the average studio setpiece.

But Evans is less interested in remaking “The Raid” than he is in one-upping “Max Payne,” and while that might be considerably easier for him to pull off, it doesn’t always play to his strengths. The opening seconds of “Havoc” establish that Evans doesn’t have the same command over hard-boiled neo-noir that he does over Indonesian battle royales, as Hardy’s introductory voiceover tees up a film that would rather spar with familiar genre tropes than clobber them into something unrecognizably new.

“You live in this world, you make choices,” Hardy mumbles over a series of rapid flashbacks that “Havoc” will soon revisit in neck-slitting detail. “Until you make a choice that renders everything worthless, and you’re left with nothing… nothing but ghosts.” 

A crooked cop with a guilty conscience? What a concept. Of course, anyone would be surrounded by their share of ghosts if they lived in the unnamed American burg where this story takes place, a homicide-happy hellhole that feels like a modern cross between “Sin City” and Joaquin Phoenix’s neighborhood from “Beau Is Afraid” (“Havoc” was shot on a massive soundstage in Wales, and its sets exude the kind of artificially exaggerated squalor that Tim Burton once brought to Gotham City). The streets are so rife with drugs and crime that Mayor Beaumont’s (Forest Whitaker) latest campaign slogan basically amounts to “Re-elect me and I promise to use my corruption for good this time!” 

So when some amateur thieves steal a truck full of laundry appliances (all of which are stuffed full of imported drugs), the only real surprise is that a squad of policemen — led by Timothy Olyphant’s Vincent — actually care enough to go after them. The chase isn’t long, but Evans’ swooping camerawork and visceral attention to velocity lend the action a wonderful sense of second-hand carnage; it’s hard to watch without reflexively dodging to avoid oncoming traffic as the truck speeds down a highway in the wrong direction. 

The cocaine, we soon learn, belongs to a pompous Triad who’s immediately gunned down in his club by a team of assassins wearing demonic hockey masks. That doesn’t sit well with the slain gangster’s mother (Malaysian actress Yeo Yann Yann), who flies in from China with a hit squad of silent assassins, and is happy to kill everyone in the city if that’s what it takes to avenge her son’s death. Detective Walker isn’t thrilled about this development either, as he’d rather spend Christmas buying the perfect gift for his estranged six-year-old daughter than getting in the middle of an international drug war, but the down-and-out gumshoe — crushed under the weight of the crimes he committed to keep the mayor out of jail — soon comes to see the case as his best shot at redemption… even if he’ll have to kill several dozen people in order to get it. 

And spoiler alert: He will have to kill several dozen people in order to get it, and he will shoot many of them with an entire clip worth of semi-automatic ammo even when a single bullet would’ve gotten the job done, because that’s just the Gareth Evans way (toward the end of the movie, one henchman performs what seems like an entire Pina Bausch routine as their dead body gets riddled with machine gun fire). The action is limited to a few isolated setpieces, but every one of them leaves a mark. An execution amid bumper-to-bumper traffic stands out for its eruptive brutality, as the shotguns in this movie have the ballistic force of a bazooka, while the centerpiece nightclub brawl assembles the overstuffed cast into a single maelstrom of bullets, butcher knives, and broken glass. I would’ve been happier to see that sequence stretch on for another 45 minutes than I was to watch Evans go through the motions of trying to button up a story that’s far more sprawling than its worth, and swells to include several overlapping redemption arcs in addition to a sloppy buffet of just desserts. 

If the knives cut a lot deeper than any of the film’s drama, “Havoc” is at least helped by the consistency of its aesthetic; unpleasant as it can be, the amount of digital noise in the nighttime cinematography immediately sets this apart from the usual Netflix gloss. There’s also a certain pleasure in watching Hardy mutter his way through some crime swill that’s as committed to the bit as he is, especially because his signature croak of resignation is such a natural fit for a genre defined by despair.

Rote as Evans’ plot might be, and wasteful as its treatment of certain characters definitely is (pour one out for Jessie Mei Li, whose screen time as Walker’s new partner greatly outweighs her purpose to the story), he has a well-developed ear for ice-cold gangster speak, and he isn’t afraid to make people pay a steep price for their penance. It’s enough to forgive him — and/or the movie gods — for making us wait so long to see him do it again. 

Grade: B-

“Havoc” will be available to stream on Netflix starting Friday, April 25.

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