3 out of 5

Directed by: Gareth Evans

Hey – have you seen The Raid? OMG, how about Raid 2?? Wait – you saw Merantau, right? Er, The Apostle? …Footsteps?

No, I’m not calling out those who maybe stopped after the first two in that list as not qualified for reviewing Havoc, Gareth Evans’ long-gestating – COVID, strikes – Netflix streamer starring Tom Hardy, more just trying to set a base level: I think we want our favorite directors or series to always be besting a previous work, when, really, I don’t know that creativity actually works that way, or should work that way. While skills hopefully sharpen over time, there’s something to be said for what something captures at the point at which it was made; furthermore, while Evans made a name off the back of a very influential actioner, there are tonal variations in his oeuvre, and things that’ve been on display in each of his projects that underline that The Raid and its sequel were absolutely not a flash in a pan and a cash-in followup.

The general consensus on Havoc is “meh,” and I get it. It’s imperfect. It’s likely that those Raid films are what drew a fair amount of people here, and Tom Hardy is a name with some weight, and regardless of the reasons, when something is announced and then sits for a bit, it’s hard to not put some expectations around it. But, man, I had just as much fun here (or was just as entertained) as with any other Evans project, and arguably moreso – if we “lost” the novelty of Raid’s martial arts + gunplay visceralness, we gained some focus that allowed the filmmaker to pare this down to under two hours, and zip the story up to pretty much just its primary elements, which, fair criticism, tends to be the only thing in Evans’ stories anyway.

So beyond the side-by-side “it’s not The Raid,” what’s causing the slant towards middling or negative reactions?

Some of those side-by-sides are triggering: The Raid was brutal and proudly tactile; Havoc tosses on tons of CG bloodspurts and greenscreen scene stitching. The Raid’s characters were stoic, or built up with atmosphere to be menacing, both of these approaches lending better import to Evans’ square dialog; Havoc has Hardy doing a who-knows-what accent that’s a laugh, and Timothy Olyphant sneering like a cartoon Western character. In The Raid, you could feel the desperation; here, guns are all super auto and have clips of (seeming) thousands of bullets; characters absorb multiple hits and keep on going; and there’s an amusing further suspension of physics as we’ll get shots of people firing point blank, while the recipient Max Payne-dives away, multiple times in a row.

Havoc, from the director of The Raid, is not The Raid. It is a completely different style of action movie, and a fun swing from Evans into the heightened world of John Woo balletics, manga explosiveness, and comic book stylishness. These are all absolutely touchpoints, whether purposeful (John Woo is explicitly visually referenced), or indirect, and though I’m in the camp of considering the movie imperfect for various reasons… I also thought it was an absolute riot.

Admittedly begging for some comparisons, Havoc’s tale is of the same breed of faceless crime epics as The Raid movies, with copper Walker (Hardy) doing a favor for a crooked-ish politician (Forest Whitaker) that puts him in the middle of a feud between some other cops (led by Timothy Olyphant’s Vincent), and some different factions of the local mob. Tasked with protecting said politician’s son (Justin Cornwell), Walker gets involved in a wild-ass nightclub shootout and a wild-ass shootout in a cabin, and yes, it’s totally fine to explain the movie around these scenes, but rest assured – there’s grunting and swearing and shooting that happens besides that.

So, great, set aside your dreams of Havoc wiping away several years of John Wick imitators, let it be Evans’ and DP Matt Flannery’s Sin City dreamscape, retooling Gangs of London into a fantasy – as a side note, Evans has worked with Flannery on every one of his films, and I adore the overblown but meaty aesthetics they achieve – what makes the flick imperfect?

Tom Hardy. That accent. Man, it’s a bummer, because concurrently to Havoc dropping, Hardy was playing a similar tuff in Mobland and pulls it off there with gusto, but he tries to imbue Walker with some of the eccentrics of his Venom character, puts on a squeaky American accent, and damn it is just… a choice. Like Bale’s Batman voice. Like Mos Def in 16 Blocks. You’re like, I get it, and it’s probably “right,” but it never lets you settle into any given scene, where Hardy’s repartee with a rat or a baddie is required to set the tone. Making the lesser dialogue beats of many of Evans movies take an even bigger hit here.

And then extending from this – and related – is the setting. Most of Evans movies are kind of setting-less outside of their set pieces, but I feel like Havoc takes some extra steps to make it clear that we’re not in the real world. There are “grounding” shots that are stripped of notable landmarks, crafting an amalgam of Asian and American side street aesthetics that’s nibbing from the Wick approach to world-building. This is part of the movie’s big swings – Havoc does feel like it exists in a broader space than Gareth’s other works – and while I kind of love it, it’s also too much and not enough: focused on to an extent that you can tell it’s A Thing, but not enough to really establish what that thing is.

In short, the movie’s distractions make it harder to appreciate the entertainment it effects, which I’m sure makes it easier to jump to propping it up next to The Raid instead. But: I’m here for this, as I’ll be here for the next Evans project, and I only hope that Havoc does enough business for Netflix to continue to encourage the director to keep pushing and exploring, and adding to that oeuvre such that every entry has stuff that I enjoy revisiting.