Writer and director Gareth Evans made a name for himself by making two highly regarded martial arts films, The Raid 1 and 2, in the Far East. His first major movie in the West was the underrated Apostle for Netflix. For his next feature, Havoc, he tackled the gritty action thriller genre with Tom Hardy signed on as the lead. Plans were to shoot the movie in 2020, but of course, Covid happened. The project was delayed until production got underway in 2021. After some poor test screenings, the movie was further delayed with reshoots and edits, and now, 4 years later, it’s streaming on Netflix.

It is set during the Christmas holiday in an unnamed big city, and from the looks of it, the city could be NYC or Chicago. Walker (Tom Hardy) is a homicide detective who is trying to mend his relationship with his ex-wife and daughter. We know right away that Walker is a dirty cop; it was shown in a brief flashback that he did something very wrong and illegal. He was assigned a young partner, Ellie (Jessie Mei Li), who is earnest in her mission to stop crime. They got pulled into something big when a police officer was severely injured while attempting to catch a semi filled with drugs, stolen by small-time criminals, including Mia (Quelin Sepulveda) and Charlie (Justin Cornwell).

Charlie happens to be the son of a powerful political figure in the city, Lawrence (Forest Whitaker). When Charlie and Mia got involved in a drug deal gone bad that left the son of a Triad boss, Clarice (Yeo Yann Yann), dead, both he and Mia are now marked for death. Since Walker and Lawrence had a history and Walker owes him, Lawrence orders Walker to find his son and bring him home safe. Walker not only has to deal with the Triad’s gang members, but he must deal with a group of bad cops led by Vincent (Timothy Olyphant).

Evans was credited as the sole writer for the movie, and while the concept was good, the execution was kind of a mess. Maybe because of reshoots or re-editing, there seem to be things that were left out, and we don’t know much about any of the main characters and their relationships. We got the introduction to each of them during the first 40 minutes, and then the movie turns into a shoot-em-up and hand-to-hand combat for the rest of the runtime.

Evans did deliver when it comes to action. But sadly, the movie was not well lit; it’s a very dark movie with terrible CGI effects. The opening car chase looked like something from a video game. Evans also shot the action scenes in the handheld shaky cam style, which I loathe. The gun battle scenes were unwatchable because everything was shaking, and I couldn’t really tell what the heck was going on in those scenes. It didn’t help that the cinematography by Matt Flannery was so dark that I had to turn up the brightness setting on my home theater projector. This is a trend that I hope will end soon.

So many DP in Hollywood these days refuse to light their movies with more lights. When you shoot movies that will go straight to a streaming service, you need to brighten up your scenes since the picture gets compressed when it streams on Netflix or other streaming services. The other head-scratching choice by Evans was to shoot the movie in what looked like sound stages, and then the terrible CGI effects of the city were added in later. I don’t know what he was going for, but it would’ve been better to shoot on location with fewer CGI effects so it would look more realistic.

One saving grace for this movie was Tom Hardy. This is the type of role that he excels in; alas, it appears that during the re-editing of the movie, many of his scenes were cut out because the filmmakers wanted to get to the action part faster. I also liked Mei Li’s Ellie; she’s the only true good character in the story, and Li was good in the role.

I was very excited when this movie was announced because I love a good, gritty action thriller, and we don’t get that type of movie that often anymore. Unfortunately, Evans fumbled and turned a good concept into a mess of a movie with terrible CGI effects and badly lit and shot action scenes. Clearly, Hong Kong action films of the 80s and 90s were his influences, especially John Woo’s films starring Chow Yun-Fat. While I’m not the biggest fan of The Raid, I really enjoyed Apostle and thought this movie was going to be something special. I was greatly disappointed.

So have you seen HAVOC? Well, what do you think?

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