Havoc: An Uninspiring Action Mishmash
When a drug heist swerves lethally out of control, a jaded cop fights his way through a corrupt city's criminal underworld to save a politician's son.
Gareth Evans’ career is unique. He was born in Wales and moved to Jakarta, Indonesia. There he was hired to shoot a documentary about a traditional Indonesian martial art called ‘pencak silat’. Evans was a lifelong fan of martial arts films. He became fascinated with it and its practitioners. He made two films featuring pencak silat: Merantau and The Raid.
The Raid was a surprise hit. Evans’ direction was rightly praised, but pencak silat was a large part of its success. Nothing quite like its violent yet rhythmic had been seen by a global audience. It introduced the world to Indonesian martial arts, much like how Ong-Bak introduced the world to Muay Thai. It was entirely unique.
The inspiration Evans found in The Raid is missing in Havoc.
Familiar scenes are present. The initial car chase. The nightclub punch-up. The final shootout. Staple moments in most action-thrillers. There’s little personality in Havoc’s version of these moments. Evans’ influences feel like afterthoughts. As if he had realised that they were lacking threw in what he could to compensate.
The controlled, near-documentary style of The Raid is absent. Evans uses stuttering shaky-cam which smears his shots into dull streaks of neon and grey. It’s hard to watch the frame twitching and sliding over its subjects.
Tom Hardy delivers a sub par performance. His use of a heavy accent works against him, drawing attention away from the fiction and placing it firmly on himself as an actor.
Timothy Olyphant is inconsequential. Forrest Whittaker is dull. Ellie Mei Li is earnest. The rest of the cast don’t leave an impression with their performance.
There’s not much any of them can do with a thin script. Evans’ strength has never been in scriptwriting. The Raid was fantastic thanks to its simplicity and clever direction. But there’s only so much simplicity and familiarity can do for an action film.
Havoc takes a scattergun approach to the journeys of its characters. Each character is swept along a raging current of adrenaline. They don’t struggle against it in a compelling way. They just allow things to happen because they aren’t characters. They’re props and distractions, whose necessity is determined by the medium in which they reside.
All this would be forgivable if the action itself were good. If the gunplay were pulse-racing. If the Hong-Kong-lite fight scenes were innovative. If anything was uniquely its own.
Havoc feels like a first draft. A subconscious composite of any action-thriller released in the past fifteen years. A film the memory of which dissolves within minutes of the end credits. At best it may have an afterlife as a film confused for another of its kind. But most likely it will die a quiet death and take its place in the ever expanding Netflix graveyard.
Thank you for reading. It means a lot to me. Subscribe via email to receive my weekly newsletter. Follow me on Bluesky or Letterboxd to keep up to date. If you're feeling generous, you can donate to the upkeep of the site at Ko-fi. Once again, thank you.