Havoc Review: Tom Hardy's Action Movie Doesn't Live Up To The Promised Chaos Of The Title

If you're going to call a movie "Havoc," I expect nothing less than wall-to-wall carnage, especially if it's arriving courtesy of "The Raid" filmmaker Gareth Evans. The Welsh director's duo of Indonesian martial arts movies are arguably the most influential action flicks of the past 15 years, arguably overshadowed only by the increasingly elaborate fights of the "John Wick" franchise – and even then, when Keanu Reeves' assassin puts down his weapon to use his fists, Evans' influence seeps through as much as the Eastern classics that came before it.

His first directorial effort since several episodes of "Gangs of London" Season 1 in 2020, and first feature since the swiftly forgotten folk horror riff "Apostle" in 2018, promises a return to the tautly choreographed mayhem of his breakout cult hits on a far more expansive scale, with the assistance of an A-list star who has made headlines more than once for unexpectedly turning up to compete in amateur jiu-jitsu tournaments.

While I can't deny that the film does indeed live up to its title, it's a disappointment because it feels like a filmmaker who previously set a new template for the genre falling behind the pack, imitating the action hits that followed in the wake of his two "Raid" efforts. There's a frenetic, live-action cartoon-style car chase reminiscent of "Mad Max: Fury Road" that opens the film, before a plethora of shoot-out set pieces that feel eerily identical to those in the "John Wick" franchise — especially a neon-drenched nightclub bloodbath scored to ear-splitting EDM. Gareth Evans is obviously gifted at staging such scenes, but they never feel particularly thrilling, so much as they feel like well-crafted copies of more memorable moments of cinematic violence. Maybe it's the Netflix effect; even though this looks a cut above your average streaming film, there's still an algorithmic quality to each of its components.

Set in a miserable American metropolis that looks closer to the sci-fi noir cityscapes of "Dark City" than a gritty, grounded genre flick, Tom Hardy plays the brooding crooked cop Walker, a man whose demeanor couldn't be better suited to the climate around him. A cynic who despises the city's corruption, despite being in bed with many of its worst offenders, the detective finds his worlds colliding when politician Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whittaker) enlists him to help find his son, who is caught in the middle of several shady underworld dealings. If this narrative sounds generic, then this is likely by design, with the writer-slash-director less interested in exploring this city's seedy underbelly than he is with forcing all its most insidious inhabitants into conflict with each other — it's always clear that he conceived of the set pieces first and worked backwards from there. This isn't always a problem, as even the briefest scenes — like Walker daydreaming an operatic gangland mass shooting — live up to the promise of the title. But it's this sheer artificiality in their conception that makes the film feel derivative of other recent, hyper-stylish action efforts, often feeling like pretty set dressing on an unremarkable, generic crime tale.

Hardy can't be blamed for this, as even though he isn't breaking any new ground with wild accent work this time, he still packs the offbeat intensity that makes this familiar antihero archetype feel more distinct than it likely does on the page. Nobody else elevates this material beyond the cliches on the dramatic front, and the longer Evans spends on a brooding crime procedural in-between the fights he's best adept at bringing to life, the more my interest waned whenever we cut back to the next dose of gratuitous killing. It's perhaps why my initial spark of excitement at a "Fury Road" indebted opening had soured by the time we got to the umpteenth of countless "John Wick" adjacent gun fights, because it's easier to pick apart the flaws in the spectacle when there's not enough narrative substance holding it together.

I'm in the minority on this, but it did remind me of why I was a lot cooler on "The Raid 2" than most. Between staging some of the best onscreen fights in cinema history — elaborate hand-to-hand combat where you can't believe nobody died during filming — Gareth Evans spent way too much time diving into an intricate criminal underworld conspiracy that felt like bloat. The martial arts "Die Hard" conceit of his first "Raid" film afforded little time for introspection, and was all the better for it; the more he tries to expand his narrative scope, the less satisfying his films become, as he's too enamored with genre conventions to do anything interesting with subverting them.

However, the biggest credit I can give Evans is that, despite shooting all the way back in 2021 — much-needed reshoots on a couple of key scenes kept getting delayed, finally wrapping last summer — this doesn't show any signs of studio wear and tear. It's his unmistakable, uncompromised vision, but with a punchier running time than his last action effort. And yet, even with all his signature touches in place, I came away disappointed. It's not that he can't pull off ensemble crime tales with a wider breadth, where different gangs face off against each other; the best episode of the AMC series he co-created is one of the first season episodes he directed, a bloody, brutal mansion siege that showed he is as adept at visceral firefights as he is mano a mano brawling. But there, his regular Director of Photography Matt Flannery — whose grainy visuals in "Havoc" effortlessly transform South Wales into a tangible American dystopia — was a co-writer, a credit he hasn't had on any other project. It does feel like Evans needs to start working with other writers, since his passion for explosive carnage rarely finds a well-executed crime story that can justify it.

If you watched any of the set pieces in "Havoc" entirely divorced from their wider context, you might find them thrilling, if a little derivative. Within the film, however, they do very little to raise the blood pressure back up after extended detours in a generic crime conspiracy difficult to get invested in. He's still a talented action director, but this plays a little too safe for my liking.

"Havoc" premieres on Netflix on April 25.