Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Gareth Evans
Starring: Tom Hardy, Forest Whitaker, Timothy Olyphant, Jessie Mei Li, Justin Cornwell, Quelin Sepulveda, Luis Guzmán, Michelle
Waterson
Welsh filmmaker Gareth Evans had to leave the UK for Indonesia to
realise his vision with a trio of acclaimed action movies - Merantau, The Raid and The Raid 2. You might view Evans as the Paul Simon of action movies in
appropriating a foreign culture, but he undoubtedly put Indonesian cinema
on the global map and revived western interest in eastern martial arts
movies. Evans returned to the UK in 2018 with the Netflix original
Apostle, a messy folk-horror that proved he was best sticking to action. More
successful was Evans' TV series Gangs of London, for which he directed several episodes that feature the distinctive
violence he's known for (a bloody farmhouse siege might be the best thing
he's ever directed). Now Evans is working with Netflix once again with the
Chicago-set cops 'n criminals thriller Havoc. But despite all that streaming money, Havoc has none of
the production value of his Indonesian movies or his TV show.
While Evans is lauded for his action scenes, he's always been found
lacking as a writer, and his limitations become immediately obvious in
Havoc's first act, which spends about a half hour clunkily setting up its plot
before the bodies start to hit the floor. A knackered Tom Hardy is
Walker, a corrupt police detective who has been moonlighting as an
enforcer for sleazy politician Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker). When Beaumont's estranged son Charlie (Justin Cornwell) goes on
the run after being framed for the murder of a Triad mobster, Walker
agrees to track him down under the agreement that it's the last job he'll
ever do for Beaumont. This sees Walker trudge across the city seeking clues and finding himself
in the middle of a war between Chinese gangsters and his fellow crooked
cops.
From the opening car chase, it's clear something is badly wrong here. The
lighting is so dim you may have to turn the brightness up on your TV, but if
you do you'll realise that it's purposefully dark to conceal some of the
shoddiest CG seen in a mainstream production in some time. There are moments
in Havoc where the effects are so bad that you might wonder if
Netflix accidentally uploaded a workprint. What was notable about Evans'
Indonesian films was how clearly presented the action was compared to the
shaky cam and ADHD editing of American action movies of the era.
The Raid 2 features a spectacular car chase that takes place
in broad daylight, so it's baffling how Evans could put together something
as bad as the chase that opens Havoc. There are two other major action set-pieces here, but the climax is also
so badly lit that you can barely make out who's shooting or stabbing
whom.
Only a mass nightclub brawl/shootout in the middle of the movie feels like
the Evans we know, but it suffers from the action auteur having to disguise
the fact that his leading actors aren't skilled in martial arts, unlike the
cast members of his Indonesian thrillers. In the '90s Hollywood hired a
bunch of Hong Kong action directors, but aside from John Woo, they all
struggled to translate their practical filmmaking to the digital artifice of
Hollywood, and Evans is similarly suffocated here. Let's face it, in
Indonesia Evans could get his performers to do things that no western
insurance company is going to agree to. Havoc plays like a
second-rate Gareth Evans wannabe rather than an actual Gareth Evans movie.
With a cast of mostly Brits pretending to be American and Chinese, it feels
like cosplay, and Wales is an unconvincing stand-in for Chicago, which is
chiefly represented by the city's skyline floating in the background of
poorly rendered, dimly lit shots.
Unlike the wall to wall mayhem of Evans' Indonesian movies, there's
probably no more than 20 minutes of action here, leaving us to listen to an
awful lot of bad dialogue in between the scraps and shootouts. The likes of
Hardy, Whitaker and Timothy Olyphant try their best to make Evans' words
sound convincing, but they're on a hiding to nothing. If the dialogue is
bad, the plotting is worse. The movie lurches from one scene to another like
a drunk trying to bum a cigarette from smokers outside a nightclub. The
film's timeline makes no logical sense; it seems to take place over a single
day and yet an army of mobsters are somehow able to get to Chicago from Hong
Kong in no more than a couple of hours. Somehow Walker's partner, rookie cop
Ellie (Jessie Mei Li), disarms two crooked cops and a gangster at one
point and is able to get them into a car and bring them to Walker's shack
on the outskirts of the city, leaving us scratching our heads as to the
logistics of such a feat. Evans' best films keep their plots simple and
are so action-packed that we don't get time to question whether they make
sense or not. Ultimately, there's only one set-piece to recommend
Havoc to Evans' fans, but be prepared to negotiate a morass
of inane dialogue and nonsensical plotting around it.
Havoc is on Netflix from April
25th.
