Havoc review (2025)

What Havoc lacks in run time it more than makes up for it with a ridiculous amount of bullets, blood spray and unbelievably stupid gunplay.

For most action films, Havoc’s ineptness would barely register. Who cares if there’s yet another over the top action film with more blood and bullets than common sense?

Havoc is a different action film altogether. It’s a new project from director/writer Gareth Evans, who helmed two of the greatest action films this century with The Raid in 2011 and The Raid 2 in 2014.

Some of Evans’ dynamic ways of shooting action sequences still carry over into Havoc, but this mix of The Raid meets John Wick rarely works.

Tom Hardy (Venom: The Last Dance) stars as Walker, a cop with a shady past. Walker is the standard hard-edge, veteran cop. He’s separated from his wife and remembers to pick up a Christmas present for his daughter on Christmas Eve at a very picked over convenience store. Naturally, he barely has any time for his new partner, Ellie (Jessie Mei Li, Shadow and Bone), who’s still in the early phase of her career and actually cares about making a difference.

Havoc kicks off with a daring high-speed chase where four thieves try to get away from police pursuit. This chase sequence is shot in an electrifying, immediately grab your attention manner as Evans makes a strong case that he could have a lot of fun directing in the Fast and Furious universe.

The chase leads to one of Walker’s old partners being seriously injured and taken to the hospital. In the aftermath, the thieves happen to be on the scene when a Yakuza boss, Tsu (Jeremy Ang Jones), and his crew are brutally slain. Surveillance footage shows one of the fleeing thieves was Charlie (Justin Cornwell, Bel-Air), the son of real estate mogul turned politician Laurence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker, Andor).

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Years ago, Walker got into a bind and Beaumont got Walker out of it, but he’s been under his thumb ever since. Walker isn’t exactly a dirty cop, but he’s certainly got a little mud on him. When Johnny’s mother (Yeo Yann Yann) arrives seeking payback, Charlie and his girlfriend, Mia (Quelin Sepulveda), are the prime targets.

With a formidable crew including the silent, but very deadly assassin (Michelle Waterson), the streets are going to get a lot bloodier until Mother gets her hands on Charlie and Mia. Desperate to save his son, Lawrence agrees to forgive Walker’s debt if he can safely get him out of town.

This is an easy role for Hardy, who is well suited to play a bruiser with a brain in Walker. Once the Havoc gets going, Hardy doesn’t get much to show off his dramatic acting chops, but he does make a credible action hero. His action star charisma carries Havoc through a large portion of the film, but there’s only so much he can do with such a limited script.

Evans makes it clear that Charlie, Mia and their two pals were not the assassins. A clear suspect is Johnny’s uncle, Ching (Sunny Pang), who got the heads up about the attack. Short of a big neon sign continually popping up over their heads, it sure seems like Walker’s old cop buddies, led by Timothy Olyphant, probably knows something about the shooting as well.

The performances are solid. That’s hardly shocking with a supporting cast including Whitaker, Olyphant and Luis Guzman, who plays Mia’s protective uncle. It just feels like a lot of Havoc’s body count wouldn’t have been so high if characters actually used their cell phones. In some cases, completely innocent characters get killed for questionable reasons.

Evans gets a lot trigger-happy with the action sequences. The Raid films benefitted as the combatants rarely used their firearms in the battles. This organically made the fights longer and required more skill. While that seems obvious, Evans doesn’t subscribe to that theory dragging out gunfights far longer than necessary.

Rather than taking an efficient two bullets — one to the chest, another to the head — approach, characters will unleash anywhere from 10-20 bullets at one adversary. It’s cartoonish overkill and nonsensical in terms of how the fights would play out assuming the guns actually don’t have an infinite bullets bonus in use. The action certainly does have a video game mentality to it, but that doesn’t make for very satisfying battles.

Matt Flannery’s (The Raid films) darker cinematography choices don’t make the fight scenes easy to follow with some looking too murky to tell who is being impaled, shot or stabbed until copious amounts of blood start gushing out.

Havoc seems like it should have been an easy recommendation based on the talent in front and behind the camera. The action overindulgence and shaky script prove far more formidable in holding Hardy down than any 20 goons can manage.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Photo Credit: Netflix

Check out Evans’ true masterpiece with The Raid and The Raid 2 Blu-Ray double-feature now on Amazon.

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