Havoc is a perfect title for Gareth Evans’ latest extravaganza, whose stock in trade is merciless, concussive chaos.
For his first film in seven years, premiering April 25, the action auteur (The Raid, Gangs of London) envisions an urban hellscape of gangsters, thieves, and crooked and crooked-er cops, in which he stages one blistering bloodstained showstopper after another. Even in a genre that’s long indulged in excessiveness, this is the ruthless over-the-top carnage aficionados covet.
In an unnamed metropolis covered in snow, mist, and grime at Christmastime, Walker (Tom Hardy) muses about choices, justifications, and regrets as Evans presents glimpses of an offense he committed 18 months earlier having to do with drugs, cash, and a dead body he disposed of via an oil drum rolled into the river.
A haunted soul, Walker is a grizzled and no-nonsense homicide detective whose facial stubble, flannel shirt-beneath-puffy-coat attire, and sarcastically menacing demeanor indicate that he’s not someone to cross. He’s also, apparently, a terrible dad, since he spends the night of Santa’s intended arrival visiting a convenience store to buy presents for his six-year-old daughter—a haul that’s so junky and pathetic that even the low-rent cashier mocks him for it.
Hardy’s Walker is a bad seed who’s remorseful about his misdeeds, whereas everyone else in Havoc is more or less comfortable with themselves. Before it can delineate the rest of its players, however, the film kicks off with an adrenalized car chase through grungy streets and bleak highways as officers stalk a semi manned by individuals in glowing face masks.
Evans’ camerawork is whiplash-inducing, careening around corners and smashing through debris in harmony with the racing vehicles, and the scene’s sheer heavy-metal muscularity is enough to leave one feeling pummeled. This pursuit concludes when the criminals throw a washing machine out the back of the truck and through the windshield of a patrol car, gravely wounding the driver and stopping the rest of the cops in their tracks—a crew that’s led by Vincent (Timothy Olyphant).
Charlie (Justin Cornwell) and Mia (Quelin Sepulveda) are the leaders of the fleeing gang, and they subsequently pay a visit to Triad boss Tsui (Jeremy Ang Jones), who hired them to steal a ton of cocaine. As the interested parties gather to complete their transaction, they’re attacked by gunmen in demon masks who shoot up the place and take the narcotics for themselves.
Fortunately, Charlie and Mia escape this massacre, but because they’re caught on camera, they’re blamed for it by everyone, including Tsui’s imposing mother Clarice Fong (Yeo Yann Yann), who’s traveled to the States to mourn her beloved son. This is not good for Charlie and Mia, nor for mayoral hopeful Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker), who’s Charlie’s estranged father, and who doesn’t want to see his son killed—or, for that matter, arrested for the slaughter, considering that it would obliterate his ongoing political campaign.
Walker is Lawrence’s right-hand man, having recently gotten him out of trouble with the district attorney, and in exchange for a clean slate, he agrees to help the politician by locating his boy before Clarice’s gang executes him. This is complicated by the fact that Walker has been saddled with an honest new partner in Ellie (Jessie Mei Li). Still, he remains a brusque battering ram who manages to get intel out of a shootout survivor by sticking his finger in a bullet wound, and to find Mia via the salvage yard-operating uncle (Luis Guzmán) who’s procuring new passports for her and Charlie so they can skip town post haste.
No matter who he’s with, Walker is an arrogant, brusque, and scary badge-holder. Hardy plays him with such rugged, ferocious intensity—as if he knows best and doesn’t care about the rules and, anyway, has no time to bother explaining himself to anyone else—that he’s nothing short of riveting.
Things go from dangerous to dire once Clarice kidnaps Lawrence in a murderous assault on his stuck-in-traffic car, and Havoc segues into unadulterated warfare when everyone converges on a nightclub in search of Mia. The ensuing battle seems to go on forever (in a good way). It features so many slashings, headshots, and assorted nastiness (including courtesy of a meat cleaver) that it puts John Wick to shame.
Evans has a gift for staging unbelievable brutality while maintaining spatial lucidity, and in this and a climactic cabin showdown between Walker, Mia, Charlie and an untold number of henchman, he whips up mind-boggling gonzo mayhem with Hardy’s protagonist at the center of it all, whether he’s gunning down baddies with a machine gun, stomping them through the floor, tackling them like a linebacker, or using poles and spearguns to viciously end their lives.
Havoc is such relentless, hardhearted business that the squeamish need not enlist. Nonetheless, those with a hankering for escalating insanity will be well satiated by this saga, whose narrative convolutions are untangled in a second half that puts a premium on combat.
Disappointingly, Evans (who wrote the script) shortchanges Olyphant in a role that’s barely one-dimensional and receives no stand-out moments—to a large extent because he shares only scant screen time with Hardy. The director makes up for it, however, with a barrage of broken bones and mutilated corpses—and set pieces drenched in slow motion and decorated with flying glass, splinter, and bodily debris—that tips the material into sensory-overload territory.
As with a bravura extended shot that travels from the interior of an elevated subway car to the street below and, then, to the basement of a nightclub—a oner whose CGI stitching doesn’t undercut its creativity—Havoc is proof positive that Evans has few peers when it comes to extreme, elaborate butchery.
In its final moments, the film falters slightly in trying to maintain its moral center, deciding to punish some of the wicked while letting others off the hook for reasons that don’t hold up to scrutiny. Even so, it’s a thrilling treatise on the idea that salvation is attainable for even the worst of the worst—so long as they’re willing to atone for their sins by enduring a gauntlet of gruesome violence.
