The Gareth Evans-directed Havoc offers explosive action, middling cop drama
The action is kinetic and terrific. The rest? Not so much.
I vaguely remember watching The Raid 2 at Sundance in the long-ago days when people paid me to write about movies and attend film festivals.
The Raid was heralded as the next great step in the faltering evolution of action movies. Writer-director Gareth Evans, a Welshman who broke through directing Indonesian martial arts extravaganzas, wasn’t just heralded as an unusually accomplished action filmmaker. Instead, he was praised as an auteur who brought an excess of excitement, intensity, and originality to a medium in desperate need of those qualities.
Evans’s hallmark as a director is barely controlled chaos. His fight scenes only feel like they’re on the verge of descending into madness. In actuality, Evans knows exactly what he’s doing, at least where action is concerned.
The hotshot action filmmaker directed only one movie between 2014’s The Raid 2 and the new Netflix original, Havoc, a 2018 folk-horror movie called The Apostle that received mostly positive reviews.
Havoc finds Evans plugging back into the live-wire electricity of The Raid and The Raid 2 for western audiences.
Tom Hardy, a British man with an unfortunate predilection for comically thick Midwestern American accents, plays Patrick Walker, a morally compromised police officer in a fictional American city that combines elements of New York and the Midwest.
The troubled lawman with the requisite complicated home life and estranged wife works for Lawrence Beaumont, a businessman and mayoral candidate played by Forest Whitaker.
Patrick works both outside and inside the law. He inhabits a gritty, noir-tinged world populated by bad cops and even worse ones.
The troubled father ends up in the middle when Charlie (Justin Cornwell), Lawrence’s bad-seed son, steals washing machines that contain cocaine that they bring to Tsui (Jeremy Ang Jones) that is then promptly stolen by masked thugs.
The masked thugs are Patrick’s former compatriots from his time working the narcotics beat, most notably Vincent (Timothy Olyphant, who does what he can with an underwritten role), an exceedingly bad cop with a killer attitude and impressive body count.
Lawrence orders Patrick to find his son before he is brutally murdered by dirty cops and Chinese mobsters who do not take kindly to their merchandise being purloined.
Charlie is in way over his head. His life becomes a manic quest for survival. Patrick and his rookie partner Ellie (Jessie Mei Li) must find Charlie and deliver him to his father before crooked cops and Chinese mobsters kill him.
Havoc contains elements that Lars Ulrich in Metallica in Some Kind of Monster would refer to as “stock.” It’s filled with well-worn conventions and exhausted cliches, from an unethical cop seeking redemption to a rookie in over her head.
Evans aspires to the stylized melodrama of John Woo but with an aesthetic that’s not just different but antithetical. Woo is all about slow-motion, grace, and beauty. In sharp contrast, Evans favors speed, spectacle, and pummeling intensity. They share an obsession with operatic emotions, familial melodrama, and wrestling with issues like honor, loyalty, and morality.
Hardy cuts a comparatively modest figure in an action world full of towering behemoths like Chris Hemsworth. He's average-sized but has the coiled intensity of a championship boxer and the murder skills of a top-level assassin.
He also kills a LOT of people. A great deal! That’s another hallmark of Evans’ style: people are murdered in great quantities in set-pieces of great quality.
There’s a profound disconnect between the savage artistry of the action sequences and the generic cop drama of everything else.
I found myself waiting impatiently for the action. I looked at my wrist with growing annoyance during scenes dominated by chatter. That’s strange, since I don’t have a watch.
In that respect, Havoc reminded me of last year’s Bad Boys: Ride Or Die. The blockbuster sequel similarly thrilled me during beautifully stylized action sequences and bored me to tears when the characters stopped kicking and punshing and shooting each other and jibber jabbered about some bullshit I couldn’t care less about.
Bad Boys: Ride Or Die solidified co-directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s status as action auteurs.
Evans is a much stronger director than writer. He’s got a hell of an eye for action but an unfortunate weakness for ubiquitous cliches.
Havoc does not benefit from premiering on Netflix. I’d prefer to see it in a packed theater rather than on television alone.
Evans has a terrific eye for action and all the promise and potential in the world. He just needs a better script and a bigger screen on which to project his feverish cinematic dreams.
Three stars out of five