Movie Review – Havoc (2025)
Principal Cast : Tom Hardy, Timothy Olyphant, Jessie Mei Li, Justin Cornwall, Quelin Sepulveda, Luis Guzman, Michelle Waterson, Sunny Pang, Jim Caesar, Xelia Mendes-Jones, Yeo Yann Tann, Forest Whitaker, Richard Harrington.
Synopsis: After a drug deal gone wrong, a bruised detective must fight his way through the criminal underworld to rescue a politician’s estranged son, unravelling a deep web of corruption and conspiracy that ensnares his entire city.
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It’s been seven long years since we were treated to a Gareth Evans film – 2018’s Apostle was a brutal, vicious watch – and the Raid director has finally delivered on his promise to return to body-shattering, violent excess with Havoc, starring Tom Hardy as a weary, could-be-corrupt cop carving a blood-soaked path through an unnamed Gotham City analogue in an attempt to save a politician’s son. Evans was an early exemplar of the kind of over-the-top John Woo-inspired ballet of violence, a style recently popularised by the John Wick franchise and filmmakers like Timo Tjahjanto (The Shadow Strays), all of whom boast incredible body counts, gratuitous carnage, and often absurdly frenetic action sequences. With Havoc, Evans attempts to bring that same gritty, urban ferocity to the fore, succeeding visually with kinetic fervour, but absolutely assassinating his own story with cluttered storytelling, derivative character beats, and a staggering amount of narrative absurdity.
Hardy plays Narcotics Agent Walker, investigating a mass killing at a nightclub involving members of the Asian Triad, and desperately searching for Charlie (Justin Cornwell), the son of a wealthy city businessman (Forest Whitaker), and his girlfriend Mia (Quelin Sepulveda), who are now targets of a vengeful Triad leader (Yeo Yann Yann). Walker’s partner, Ellie (Jessie Mei Li), detests Walker’s sullen, abrasive demeanour, but nevertheless assists him in his mission through her own contacts within the city’s law enforcement, despite crossing swords with crooked narcotics officers like Vincent (Timothy Olyphant) and his goon squad.
I hate to admit it, but Havoc is pretty bad. Not from a technical standpoint – the stunt work, fight choreography, and intense pace are often impressive – but rather from a narrative and character perspective. There’s little empathy generated for anyone on screen; Havoc becomes a film of endurance, a shattering showcase of inventive kills and non-stop brutality that deafens and pummels the viewer into numbed submission. There’s no emotional investment required: even Hardy’s acidic Walker, a character presumably intended to occupy some morally ambiguous, shadowy heroism, comes across as thoroughly unlikeable. Hardy mumbles his way through the film, and even a fleeting glimpse of a former family life is too cursory to create any meaningful connection. This apathy for Walker translates almost immediately to apathy for the viewer.
The idea of a corrupt, soulless metropolis, bathed in neon and teeming with moral rot, is hardly new, and one suspects the Cardiff-shot setting was a half-hearted attempt to mimic Christopher Nolan’s vision of Gotham from The Dark Knight trilogy. For a time, it tends to work. Unfortunately, Evans – who penned the screenplay – bizarrely sets his film during Christmas Eve, adding awkward seasonal signposting between the bullets and the blood, resulting in a weirdly prickly tonal imbalance that feels distracting rather than atmospheric. And Hardy is no Batman: Walker lacks a cape, charisma, or even a coherent character arc. The film hints at a schlocky deadbeat-dad subplot, but it’s never fleshed out in any satisfying way. The collision between crooked cops, Triad operatives, and various nameless henchmen never achieves the operatic menace of Batman’s Rogues Gallery. If anything, Havoc’s aesthetic most closely resembles Blade Runner’s dystopian cityscape – minus the layered world-building or thematic heft – but Evans is no Ridley Scott, and it shows.
Where the story crumbles into dust, Evans’ team of stunt performers, visual effects artists and editors assault us with an unrelenting orgy of violence. Shot with a frenetic, almost manic handheld aesthetic, the camera jitters, zooms and jostles its way through impossibly intimate angles, desperate to capture every droplet of blood and snap of bone. I’m not entirely sure why this particular story – which could easily have been torn from the headlines of the Mexican drug cartel wars – required such an operatic level of gore, but Evans gleefully leans into sadism, seemingly hoping to overwhelm the narrative’s shortcomings with sheer chaotic ferocity. Several times I winced at the implied agony of the violence, as the body count escalates almost exponentially – characters we like, characters we barely know, and dozens of innocent bystanders are obliterated during this absurdly bloody holiday season.
The film’s opening semi-truck chase, badly underlit and heavily reliant on digital inserts, segues into nightclub blade-work, close-quarters shootouts, and more bloodletting than the Battle of the Somme. The opening chase scene sees a tumble dryer repurposed as a deadly weapon – and that’s well before we even reach the cabin-in-the-woods climax, which leaves a veritable mass grave of bodies behind, filmed in such strobe-lit darkness you might need Panadol afterwards. Credit where it’s due: the film’s sound design is superb, and it’s a genuine shame Havoc never saw a theatrical release, where its wall-rattling mixing might have made a stronger impact.
Make no mistake: the action sequences and stunt work here are among the best you’ll see anywhere. The technical achievements are undeniable. The many, many problems with Havoc lie entirely at the feet of Gareth Evans’ script and his broad, clumsy character construction. Not even an actor of Hardy’s calibre can conjure a character worth caring about, as Walker’s internal moral arc – such as it is – remains obtuse, unsatisfying, and fundamentally uninteresting. The ensemble cast do their best, though most are handed either clichés or caricatures: Luis Guzmán briefly shines as a blue-collar passport forger working on Christmas Eve (because of course he is), while Timothy Olyphant channels a kind of deranged insanity in his portrayal of a sadistic detective, the kind of performance that belongs more in a padded cell than a cinema screen.
The film’s background players offer standard “sneer at the camera and die horribly” bad guy work, and Evans attempts to bulldoze past the narrative weaknesses with escalating set-pieces of carnage. Yet, the endless barrage of gunfire, blood, and bone-crunching violence soon devolves into numbing white noise. Havoc is, ultimately, a mess. While certain action sequences are dazzling to behold, at no point would I call this an enjoyable film unless you have a penchant for bloodsports or masochism for its own sake. Skip it.
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