Tom Hardy's 'Havoc' Is Ultraviolent, Hard Boiled Nonsense

Netflix’s latest, Havoc, comes from writer/director Gareth Evans (The Raid: Redemption). Talking about the film, Evans told Letterboxd that its origin was “a sort of love letter to two different types of filmmaking, one being the American crime films of the 70s … and then also my love of Hong Kong action cinema.” In the same interview, the film’s star (and a producer) Tom Hardy notes how he wanted his morally ambiguous cop character to feel like the grounded type of character one might see on The Wire tossed into the comic-book type heightened action that Evans is known for. So Tom Hardy plus The Raid guy, making a movie inspired by the likes of The Wire, The French Connection, and Hard Boiled? While this is a grade-A recipe, Havoc unfortunately delivers yet another plate of Netflix movie disappointment. It’s not as bland as a lot of the other action flicks the streamer has given to us, but it also has no aftertaste. (Ok, enough of this strained metaphor.)

The film opens with Hardy’s Walker, a morally ambiguous cop, monologuing to the audience about the bad choices one tries to justify. It’s cliched drivel, but it’s kinda of refreshing to hear Hardy deliver lines in his normal voice. From there, we jump into an action scene involving an 18-wheeler and washing machines, and we’re off. Over the course of the first act, the film sets up a lot of pieces. Walker is part of a small ring of dirty cops, one of whom is a very clenched Timothy Olyphant (another of whom is in a coma on account of … well, one of the aforementioned washing machines). He’s also juggling a debt owed to a mayoral candidate (Forest Whitaker) while also training a new do-gooder partner (Jessie Mei Li). Meanwhile, a criminal meeting in a nightclub goes sideways, leading the matriarchal head of the Tsui crime family (Yeo Yann Yann) on a revenge journey. Throw in some youths in the wrong place at the wrong time, and a shady salvage yard owned by Luis Guzmán, and the chessboard is set.

Given all these pieces, the film’s plot is surprisingly, and a little disappointingly, not all that complicated. Unfortunately, it’s also not all that interesting. It mostly feels like chess pieces being moved around the board to set up a few set pieces. That comes with a certain forward-driving energy, which is just enough to keep the viewer’s attention despite the clunky, driveling dialogue. The first time the threads start coming together to set up a giant action sequence, we’re almost halfyway through the movie and I practically had a bloodlust as evidenced by my scratched out notes reading “been [a] clunky setup but this should fuck LFG!” What follows is an eight-ish minute action scene that is chaotic and at time gruesome and frenetic and … yet it does not, unfrotunately, fuck. Evans knows how to shoot and cut great action, so this and the other action scenes are all very competent, at times engaging, and not without a few sweet sequences. But the film’s action taken as a whole is just lacking something to elevate this to something beyond a better-than-average Netflix actioner.

So it turns out that the part of the movie that’s crime thriller just does not have a compelling enough throughline, and the part that’s Hong Kong action isn’t enough to hold the rest up. The direction and pacing are good, and Evans makes up as much as he can for the bland script he gave himself to work with. And Hardy is solid throughout, mostly hitting his goal of making a character that feels somewhat grounded - it’s just that grimdark Hardy is his least interesting mode and this character has no spark of joy or weirdness or any of the other elements that Hardy brings to his best performances. As for the rest of the cast, they range anywhere from very good to good enough, but none of them particularly stand out (other than the aforementioned Olyphant clench), as Hardy and the action are really the two stars. Ultimately, Havoc seems to be about the best we can ask for a Netflix action thriller - it’s good enough to kill half of a Saturday evening watching the kills, even if you won’t remember anything about it by the next weekend.