Ever since the climax of The Raid II back in 2014, I have been desperately waiting for Gareth Evans to get his hands bloody once more with an action feature. It’s not like the action guru has been resting on his laurels with nasty rural horror Apostle and co-creating gnarly crime show Gangs Of London filling up his resume – in fact the infamous farmhouse episode of season one brutally bent over backwards to prove that Evans certainly hadn’t lost his chaotic touch – but while horror films and small screen gangsters are great and all, what I truly wanted from the destructive Welshman is another self contained feature which delivered the goods like no one else could.
Actually, what I really wanted was The Raid III, but until the cinema gods provide me with such action manna from heaven, I’m more than willing to march to the sounds of Evans’ fife no matter where it takes him. Luckily for me and anyone who craves dialed up violence, we only had to go to Netflix to find it thanks to the release of HAVOC (yes, the capital letters are necessary) – but can the man who made slicing open a man’s jugular with a bit of fluorescent tubing an art form show that he hasn’t lost a step?
There’s an old saying that states that “no one’s innocent” and if you take a quick peek at the characters beginning to assemble in this snow dusted, urban shithole, it feels almost suffocatingly accurate. After an opening car chase that sees an officer in pursuit partially crushed from a washing machine full of stolen cocaine thrown from the back of a truck, it proves to be the ignited fuse that’s about to draw a clutch of corrupted people into the event horizon of a black hole of violence. Not long after the incident, the gang who stole the coke are trying to sell it to the Triads, but before the sale can properly take place, it’s strafed with high velocity machine gun rounds as a masked, well armed group swoop in and drill everyone present with more holes than a tramp’s underwear. This is where things start to get really complicated.
Assigned to the case is scuzzy homicide detective Walker, who just may have more skeletons in his closet than anyone else around due to an unlawful act from his past that has soured almost everything in his life. Partnered with idealistic beat cop, Ellie, he approaches the carnage with the same, cynical, detached attitude he usually has, but after recognising a familiar face on security footage, he realises things are about to go impressively sideways. You see one of the youthful gang members involved in the coke deal is the son of the corrupt Mayor Beaumont who once had Walker and his old cop crew do something nasty for him and he now expects the grizzled Walker to take care of this problem and save his boy.
With Walker only a small part of a larger puzzle that’s all connected by a multitude of crimes and sins, it seems like the only way out for all the various fractions – including Walker’s old teammates and a whole buttload of vengeful, Triad assassins – is to pump human bodies with as many bullets as they can. HAVOC is assured.
There will no doubt be some who will regard HAVOC sight unseen as just another Netflix action flick that’s trying to ride the bulletproof coattails of John Wick, but anyone who knows their action history will be aware that Evans is shooting (literally) for far older inspiration in the form of the subgenre of Hong Kong cinema known as Heroic Bloodshed. Switch out John Wick for John Woo and you find yourself in a far more accurate ballpark as the director’s obvious love for the maniacally operatic Hard Boiled is plain as the bullet hole in the middle of your face and he opts to drop the bone breaking martial art of Pencak Silat with good, old fashioned gunplay.
The result is nothing short of stunning, with the film making up for a plot that’s essentially frame work for a pair of gargantuan shoot-em-ups that are every bit as urgent, vicious and gleefully exciting as you’d expect. Wondering how Evans was planning to follow up the kitchen fight in The Raid II where two men dirty a pristine white kitchen with their insides? Step right up into arguably some of the best action set pieces you’re likely to see all year as cabins in the woods are reduced to splinters by errant gunfire and skulls are hastily reconfigured thanks to the kick of a pump action shotgun. However, before we get too deep into the havoc of HAVOC, we should really throw a peek at the other aspects of the film starting with Tom Hardy looking worryingly at home coated in other people’s brain matter. The actor positively revels in playing the lead as downtrodden and as morally compromised as he can, skating over the scumbag cop tropes (shattered marriage, shitty fathering skills, young partner who hasn’t yet had the hope kicked out of her) with glee, he lopes across the screen with a visibly bruised soul, looking every bit as grimy and downtrodden as the city he wallows in – I mean, Mad Max looks like he has better personal hygiene and he lives in an actual apocalypse…
Still, he’s a perfect, ratty star for the other characters to orbit around, but arguably HAVOC’s most noticeable flaw is that by building up to the violent stuff in such a stylized way (think the video game grunge of Max Payne mixed with a colourised version of Frank Miller’s Sin City) that some of the players remain not much more than ciphers played by some famous faces. Both Forrest Whitaker and Timothy Olyphant as corrupt Mayor and crooked cop go above and beyond what’s expected of them, but remain curiously one dimensional compared to some of the other characters played by lesser known actors.
Also rather intriguing is the choice of Evans to make some of the exterior shots and car chases rely heavily on some digital hocus pocus which doubles down on giving the movie the restless, relentless feel of a particularly fast paced video game, bur when it comes to the nasty stuff, HAVOC may make you wait nearly an hour for the real shit to start, but when it does it’s brain splattering nirvana. There’s a good chance that when 2025 finally wraps up, the central club fight may very well stand tall and bloodied as one of the greatest action sequences of the year as it moves past John Wick style slickness to fully embracing the spectacular ugliness of someone getting chopped to pieces by automatic fire. The blood sprays, the debris spackles the screen on glorious slow-mo and in the midst of it stands Hardy, looking like a disheveled, Greek God as he takes almost as many hits as he gives. Shotguns blasts hit people like rocket powered sledgehammers and anyone who complains that the film is leaning hard on an infinite ammo cheat is missing the point. John Woo didn’t give a fuck about how many bullets a gun could actually hold and when feral violence is this fucking awesome, neither should you.
I don’t know if Gareth Evans and Chad Stahelski are actually locked in an unofficial, cinematic battle to the death in order to become the natural heir of John Woo, but if they are, I truly hope it never ends. Some may decry the flimsy nature of some of the characters as it’s sacrificed in setting up gunfights so hard hitting, they could rock the world off its axis, but on the other hand, when the actions this good, I’d gladly sacrifice a whole lot more in order to let Evans cook like a maniac.
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