Gareth Evans return to action is muddled by too many cliches and wooden performances, with action scenes that are a little too hectic and disjointed for their own good.
Back in 2011, an action film out of Indonesia rocked the film world. The Raid was unlike anything anyone had seen before, moving like a runaway freight train, filled with gunfights, hand to hand fighting, and gallons of blood and gore. Introducing the world to the martial art of Silat, action fans saw fighting that moved at blistering speeds and caused maximum damage. The Raid quickly became the de facto capital A “Action Film” of the 2010’s, inspiring dozens of films and filmmakers. There is no John Wick without The Raid.
And, there is no The Raid without director Gareth Evans. Seemingly appearing out of nowhere, Evans was poised to be the new king of action cinema. But, after the quick follow up of The Raid 2, Evans seemed to disappear from the scene. Besides a detour to folk horror with the uneven The Apostle, and writing/directing the first few episodes of Gangs of London, Evans had all but disappeared from the genre that he helped steer.
Now, nearly 15 years after The Raid, Evans has returned with Havoc. After all these years, has Evans once again struck gold?
Not really! Havoc is a film that touches upon Evans strength as a filmmaker here and there, but is mostly dragged down by his deficiencies. Havoc follows crooked detective Walker (Tom Hardy, doing his grumbliest voice yet!) who, after discovering that the son of mayoral candidate and Walker’s dirty handler Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker) was involved in a Triad massacre, he must go rogue to find the boy before the Triads, or his former partners-turned-enforcers, do.
If any of this sounds familiar, such as the dirty cop finding redemption, or gang of rogue cops doing the mob’s dirty work, or gang wars started because of misleading information, it’s because you’ve probably seen this exact movie played out in like a 100 different VOD films. There’s nothing even close to original here, feeling more like a pastiche of every dirty cop cliche from the last 30 years. Which also means it’s pretty obvious where this is going about 5 minutes in, which makes a lot of the “investigating” scenes a bit of a slog.
But, hey; The Raid is literally just “cops need to get to the top of a building”. There’s nothing complicated or narratively deep about that! If you’re here to watch a Gareth Evans movie, you’re here to see some absolutely jaw dropping action. So, does Havoc at least deliver on that front?
Again, not really! The action in Havoc is edited to absolute hell, shifting into some sort of modern era “shaky cam” style, where the camera follows every hit, with 1-3 second intervals between cuts. In theory, it seems like it would be a fun, impactful way to shoot it, but in practice, it’s an exercise in motion sickness. What seems to be happening here, if I could be so bold, is Evans is used to shooting with former martial artists and stunt professionals; people who can make the action look fluid and real at full speed. My guess is that Evans isn’t used to shooting classically trained actors selling punches, which gives us these constant cuts to try and bring the intensity up. Either way, it is disorienting.
But, then, for a 10 minute stretch in the 3rd act, it all comes together. Walker has to defend against dozens of faceless bad guys in a small cabin in the middle of the woods, and, all of a sudden, Havoc feels like the bastard child of John Woo and Sam Raimi. Gun fire blasts through every surface, looking closer to cannon fire. Walker moves from gun to gun, picking up rifles off the ground, emptying them into some poor schmucks chest, before finding another one amongst the rubble. Several motherfuckers are ripped to pieces by hooks once the gunfight turns hand to hand. The camera swoops and zooms with perfect precision, Evans showing that he has cinematic gunfighting down to a science.
I found myself grinning ear to ear, thinking the rest of the 3rd act would move at this insane pace. But, sadly, the Grand Guignol bloodshed ends, and we kinda just putter to the end with a real tired “redemption” arc.
There are other merits to Havoc, for sure, though. The way it is shot and presented is real fucking weird, but in a very interesting way. The world of Havoc is more like a video game than a real place. After racking my brain, the best comparison I could come to was that Havoc seems like it exists in the Max Payne universe; a dirty, grungy world that feels like a hyper stylized version of the “Fear City” era of NYC. Everyone is either dirty on the inside or the outside.
This feeling of a video game world is even more magnified by the CGI. Every single car scene, be it a chase or just driving from point A to point B, is digitally created, and has a video game energy about it, with cars moving at unnatural speeds, blasting through snowy streets at NASCAR velocity. It’s all a bit jarring at first, feeling like a cheap corner cutting measure, but once it is clear that it is a style choice, there is something very unique about how it adds character to the world.
Still, even the stuff that does work doesn’t really make up for what doesn’t. Havoc sags, much more than a film that’s under 2 hours should, with performances that are stereotypical at best, wooden at worst (Timothy Olyphant puts in a world class “bare minimum for a paycheck” performance here). The energy that we saw in The Raid is still here in the action scenes, but the focus is all over the place, the tightly shot/edited fights we saw in 2011 turning into a jumbled mess here (outside of the perfect cabin scene). The even bigger problem is that Evans really hasn’t gotten any better at all the non-action stuff, creating a real paint-by-the-numbers crooked cop story that just sinks the rest of the interesting stuff at play here.
Sure, The Raid was an absolute game changer. But, since 2011, we’ve seen the rise of more than a few players in the action space. Chad Stahelski created an international hit with the John Wick series, utilizing the same sort of fast paced but clearly shot action that The Raid had popularized only a few years prior. In Indonesia, Timo Tjahjanto has made a name for himself taking up the silat mantle, creating a murderers row of top tier action films (The Night Comes For Us is arguably The Raids equal in action set pieces). Hell, even VOD has upped their game, with the works of filmmakers such as William Kaufman and Jesse V. Johnson really driving up the quality of the VOD action space.
This is all to say that the genre has shifted and changed and grown since The Raid. Unfortunately, with Havoc, It appears Evans hasn’t done much growing as a filmmaker since then.
