Havoc review – Tom Hardy's gonzo gun mayhem misses the point
The title is appropriate. Welsh director Gareth Evans is the action maestro who rocked our world with his superb skull-rattling thrillers The Raid and The Raid 2; this new one for Netflix certainly has its fair share of OTT gonzo mayhem. Shootouts in cramped interiors and in the open air sometimes seem to go on so long that the gunfire feels like an extended drumroll. Dozens of people get riddled with bullets from automatic weaponry; they all go into that shoulder-rolling, arm-waving, blood-spurting choreography. At one stage, a comatose and heavily bandaged person in a hospital bed gets the same machine gun treatment, and even this poor guy has to jitterbug, infinitesimally and horizontally, in his hospital pyjamas as he gets filled full of lead.
But frankly the action and the violence is too chaotic and almost meaningless and the CGI-Gotham-type cityscape where the drama takes place feels too artificial to me. (The film was actually shot in Cardiff.) Tom Hardy, doing his wheezy-nasal and faintly Cagney tough guy voice, plays Walker, a disillusioned but basically decent cop, who has found himself coerced into doing dirty work for corrupt politician Lawrence Beaumont, played by Forest Whitaker.
When Beaumont's son Charlie (Justin Cornwell) is wanted for involvement in drug running and apparently slaying a pampered young prince of the Chinese gangs, it is Walker who has to somehow rescue Charlie both from the police and the vengeful triads. He has the help of a smart young rookie cop Ellie (Jessie Mei Li) but must face a horribly corrupt and cynical officer, Vincent, played by the reliably malign Timothy Olyphant.
Evans certainly brings the craziness and the violence but, for me, without the stylish martial arts of his Raid films and without any plausible sense that anything is believably at stake.
Havoc is on Netflix from 25 April.
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