HAVOC (2025)

Director Gareth Evans – The Raid: Redemption (2011), The Raid 2 (2014) – brings his signature style of post John Woo, Gun-fu for the direct-to-streaming Netflix universe. We have bigger names – Tom Hardy, Timothy Olyphant, Forest Whitaker – a bigger budget and a teeny plot. But let’s be honest. There’s little need for a challenging story here. I mean, you can try getting invested if you’d like, but be warned, you may find yourself questioning the point as there’s not much, or anyone for that matter, worthy of your intellectual or emotional bandwidth. And that’s simply because we never really get a sense of who anyone is in this violent slice of life. Hardy, of course, brings the urgency and an impression of depth to his deadbeat dad/crocked cop character, but it’s unnessesary colour. Essentially, he’s sort of a bad cop, but not as bad as the other bad cops, so he’s our hero by default. He gets ‘er done and so we like him enough as he takes us ’round town to the other and more sleazy cops in the nameless city, revealing just who is the worst of the worst. Like I said. Don’t care. None of it matters. Because what I realized trying to follow the mystery confounding our hero, is it’s all widow dressing for a delightful bloodfest. A bloodfest we, at the very very least, would like our hero to win. And that’s really all she wrote. We’re offered some outstanding fight sequences with way too much CGI blood splatters and sprays, and yes, exceedingly chaotic and impressive human battles. The dialogue is really just a short breather between balls-to-the-wall, blood drenched insanity. So, if your idea of a good time must involve an absorbing narrative and feeling anything for anyone, I would look elsewhere. Or, if you liked The Raid movies, you will love Havoc.

WATCH OR NOT: WATCH

Additional musings: Although I like me some mayhem and violence, I do prefer it mixed in with good character development. Perhaps a TV series structure would have worked better for the story.