Ultra-violent filmmaker Gareth Evans is finally back into the realm of crime thriller features, 11 years after the incredible feat of The Raid 2. There was a sense that maybe this could be the English language version of that bloody extravaganza but it’s unfortunate that the script and overall narrative let it down dreadfully.

In Havoc, a drug bust goes awry between the young estranged son of the Mayor and the Chinese mob when a group of masked men come in and murder the mob. Semi-corrupt cop Walker (Tom Hardy) is tasked by the corrupt mayor (Forrest Whittaker) to retrieve his son from the criminal underworld, with the help of good cop Ellie (Jessie Mei Li) whilst having to battle even more corrupt cop friends including Vincent (Timothy Olyphant). Unsurprisingly this film tackles corruption, where every character seems to live above the law in ways that challenge the very foundations of your suspension of disbelief.

What made the successful previous films that made Evans the go-to ultra-violence director was his ability to weave a fantastic action sequence that felt brutal but also had you laughing at it’s goriness. The Raid sequences just felt endlessly fun, but with Havoc they just feel endlessly endless. The sequences just go on and on and on, watching someone jerking around whilst being shot with 50 bullets just gets dull when you see it again and again. It’s a shame because there are some fantastic action scenes, including the opening truck & police chase which is shot so cleverly. There’s a real motivation in chase scenes like that, but when it came to the final shoot-out (what feels like the 10th one of the film), there’s no reason for it all to go as long as it does.

The overall narrative is lacking too, I have no reason to care for the Mayor and his son, and I have no longing for Walker to complete his quest because he is doing it for a culmination of reasons that happen off screen. Without that character development there is just no reason to root for these people, I didn’t even care for the early scene of Walker trying to speak to his daughter either. They’re damn lucky that Tom Hardy agreed to be in this because he does bring his normal gruff bravado to the character that makes him inherently likeable. Forrest Whittaker, the most decorated of actors here, delivers the most phoned-in Whittaker performance you’ve seen in a long time, pretty awful from him. Also Havoc wins the award for the least Christmas feeling film every to be set at Christmas, if they didn’t specifically mention it’s at Christmas you wouldn’t know, it doesn’t seem at all cold enough when they’re shooting outside and it adds almost nothing to the story. If you want a Die Hard kind of vibe where it would maybe be classed as an unofficial Christmas movie then okay, but don’t release it at the end of April! 

A lot of the film is shot very well, the shaky cinematography works well to move the action scenes forward and add that extra oomph to the hits and the stabs and the shots etc. The score was a little too much at times, dramatising scenes a little more than I would have liked and sometimes just not gelling right with what was on screen. If you put Gareth Evans with a competent screenwriter then we could have a hard-hitting and truly compelling action film that rises above the B-Movie pulp that Havoc is punching down to. Also then the very expositional dialogue could be better and the film could move forward more naturally, rather than what we have here which is a clunky mess that just wants to rush from one action sequence to the other. If not then I hope Evans can just go and make The Raid 3 instead.