by Jake Bourgeois, Contributing Writer
When Gareth Evans, director of The Raid and The Raid 2, comes out with a new action flick starring Tom Hardy, it’s going to get my attention. So I fired up Havoc, the director’s first feature film since 2018’s The Apostle,to see if he could recapture that action magic in a bottle.
We follow Walker (Tom Hardy), a cop caught up in a web of corruption. In trying to do one last favor to clear his ledger for a corrupt mayoral candidate (Forest Whittaker), he has to fight his way through his fellow corrupt cops and Chinese gang members out for blood.
The film starts off with a car chase, and it looks kinetic and has some flair — but that feeling is fleeting. Too often, car chases look like video game scenes with cartoonish-looking vehicles and that mirror the laughable CGI squibs littered throughout the action set pieces. The camera flourishes too often distract, rather than add, to what’s being put on screen. It takes a while, but once the first hand-to-hand fights scene kicks off at the film’s midpoint, it (very briefly) becomes the spectacle I was hoping for. However, aside from one fairly lengthy sequence, none of the rest of the action comes close to hitting that high.
Hardy feels like he’s still in Venom mode. Given the fact his accent was one of the reasons I never dove into the franchise, not exactly a revelation I was pleased about. There are some interesting moments for his character where you see the good cop underneath it all, but he’s a tough protagonist to get fully behind. The film also has him do his best Will Graham in Hannibal impression, with a visualization of how a crime scene came to be, but it’s only used once, therefore being more of a confusing one-off than a cool feature.
Hardy isn’t alone in being underwhelming. Whitaker is legitimately bad as the corrupt real estate mogul-turned-wannabe-mayor with the police force under his thumb, and Timothy Olyphant isn’t given nearly enough to do in his role as a foil for Hardy within the rotten police department.
Look, the scripts were never the strength of The Raid films, but the action was so otherworldly spectacular, it didn’t really matter. Without the set pieces being on that level, the fact that Havoc tells a story about corrupt cops that you’ve seen a million times has nowhere to hide. There are no real good guys here, outside of Walker’s new partner (Jessie Mei Li), so it was hard to get too invested in their fates.
If you can get to the halfway point (and I don’t blame you if you can’t), for a moment, while the movie’s flaws don’t disappear, it becomes fun enough to at least cover them up for a while (until they rear their ugly heads again). Unfortunately, such moments are far too fleeting and, too often, the action is little more than just audio and visual noise.
Rating: Didn’t Like It
Havoc is currently streaming on Netflix
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