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Time Magazine
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
Why Havoc ‘s Most Crucial Scene Is Also Its Subtlest One
Nestled in the back half of Gareth Evans' Havoc, a stunningly violent film that does exactly what it says on the tin, two parents sit down for an unexpected heart to heart about weariness and woe. One of them is corrupt politician Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker), who longs to reconcile with his estranged son, Charlie (Justin Cornwell). The other is a vicious gang boss (Yeo Yann Yann), never acknowledged by a given name, but by her status in Triad society ('big sister'); officially, she is credited as 'Tsui's mother.' She's in the middle of orchestrating a revenge campaign on behalf of her son, Tsui (Jeremy Ang Jones), cut down early in the film during a drug deal gone bad, though his killers see it as having gone precisely according to plan. As she and Beaumont unexpectedly open up to one another, tipping out the hopes and dreams they have, or had, for their children, Havoc slows down and lets a hush settle in, replacing bedlam and bullet reports–a spare sentimental beat in a film where feelings are inconveniences at best and liabilities at worst. It's a gripping, savage piece of work on account of its raucous and intense action, but it's the quiet parts that help drive the loud ones home. Latching onto characters Moments like that are as key to Evans' cinema as the athletically made and kinetically shot melees he became known for in 2011, when his third feature, The Raid, made its world premiere at the year's edition of the Toronto International Film Festival to instant hosannas; the film is action cinema's take on the chamber drama, where an Indonesian police squad is trapped in an apartment complex and beset on by gang members and its residents alike. Enough jaw-dropping critical injuries are sustained by characters in The Raid to overcrowd the Pitt. Still, the emotional undercurrents help pull viewers along. 'Every time I've written anything, even though the characters always exist in a world and with circumstances that feel larger than life, there's always an emphasis on trying to find an element of the storyline or the relationship between the characters that I can latch onto,' Evans explains in a conversation with TIME. In his post- The Raid projects especially, including its 2014 sequel, The Raid 2, his first collaboration with Netflix, 2018's Apostle, and his 2020 Sky Atlantic TV series Gangs of London, Evans looks for avenues he can channel his personal anxieties through. Typically, his concerns are parental. The Raid 2, for instance, a two and a half hour crime and punishment epic, boils down to one man's struggle to win the approval of his stern father; whether this is significant to Evans' life or not, the motif nonetheless transitions cleanly into Havoc. More than a decade has passed since then, and Evans now has a child of his own–a life change he reflects on directly through Havoc 's themes. 'It was always about mining the fear of what it means to raise [children] properly,' he says, 'and what it means to question every little decision.' Parents will keep themselves awake at night wondering what path their kids will take as they grow up, and whether they've steered them toward a good one (much less taught them the wisdom to take it). It's a natural consequence of his own parenthood that emerges in Evans' work, but the neurosis he mines is universal. Parenting with pain Granted, Evans isn't a high-ranking member in China's organized crime hierarchy, or a dirty mayoral candidate, or a crooked police officer, like Walker (Tom Hardy), Havoc 's troubled antihero, a hard-boiled detective wracked by guilt over the initially undisclosed sins of his past; Beaumont enlists him to track down Charlie, who has been framed for Tsui's slaying and is thus on his mother's hit list. The 'fretting parent' motif manifests in Walker's arc, too. He and his wife are separated, and he dearly wants to spend more time with their daughter; his ex is reluctant, given his dangerous profession and overall amorality. His habit of buying gifts at the last minute doesn't help. (The movie introduces him shopping for his daughter's Christmas present at a bodega as the holiday looms. Nobody's perfect, perhaps corrupt cops especially.) Walker, Tsui's mother, and Beaumont's individual distresses are grounded in Havoc 's structure and action. They make up the film's beating heart, carrying the burdens of their regret; it's their own fault that their children keep distance from them. Beaumont aches to close that distance, while 'big sister' is consumed by the tragic reality that Tsui's death means she'll never close it. 'At what point is it too late?' Evans asks. 'At what point do you give in? Who has the resolve to keep fighting for that?' Action cinema's compact is deceptively simple: show the audience well-choreographed fights, whether they're conducted by hand, gun, or other martial implements, and they'll be happy. But action sans thought–recent examples include The 355 and A Working Man –amounts to disposable mayhem at best, like cottony candy that knocks your teeth out instead of just rotting them. In the case of Havoc, giving 'big sister' and Beaumont personalities as well as motivation prevents the narrative from tipping into nihilism (an attention to characterization which, frankly, applies to all of Evans' films). 'Everyone's got shades of gray. Everyone's fallible,' Evans says. 'It was always important to find little touchstones, where you can say, 'There's humanity there, there's still something to hold onto.' Otherwise it's just pain.' Storytelling and character development through action The dialogue between Beaumont and 'big sister' functions like a Tylenol tablet, a few minutes of mercy in a movie it's broadly absent from. 'Big sister' doesn't believe in due process; she believes that Charlie murdered Tsui, and she acts accordingly. (''Play this like you're the hero of your own movie,' Evans recalls telling Yann.) Beaumont leverages his knowledge of Walker's past misdeeds to strong-arm him into recovering Charlie. For his part, Walker wants to leave those misdeeds behind him, and in Evans' calculus, that, coupled with his tough-guy reticence, makes him the wrong character for driving home Havoc 's parenting theme. Hence 'big sister' and Beaumont's exchange in the film's third act. Evans didn't plan it, per se; he realized, naturally, that these characters, in this particular moment, were right for punctuating that theme. 'The set piece has to feel like it's organic, that it comes from the characters,' Evans says. 'It's not just because we're on page six or 10 or whatever, that we're going to drop in a moment of spectacle.' Small presentation, big impact In Havoc 's ratcheting chaos, even a scene of two characters talking calmly does feel spectacular. Evans saw this seemingly minor sequence as an opportunity for Yeo and Whitaker to give their characters pathos, and took it. But there's a practical reason for 'big sister' and Beaumont to speak with one another at this point in the story, too: to set up that last half hour. 'It felt like, in the construct overall, a sobering moment to have within this film,' Evans notes, 'which is admittedly a rollercoaster ride with big action sequences.' Without further context, he could be describing any of his movies. Every Evans production is an amusement park ride with a body count. But Havoc is closer to Gangs of London than The Raid 2; that movie contains a critical mass of action sequences, and as Evans puts it, 'a lot of deleted scenes that I probably shouldn't have spent money shooting.' He focused on economy of action with Havoc instead, emphasizing world-building geography and characters ahead of explosive action, which is consequently as impressive in scale as even The Raid and The Raid 2 's standout sequences. Forget, by the way, that you'll be watching Havoc on a smaller screen. Like every child of the 1980s with a lifelong love of genre cinema, Evans encountered the likes of Sam Peckinpah, Akira Kurosawa, and golden age Hong Kong martial arts cinema not in a theater, but at home. 'The first time I watched them would've been pan and scan on a 21-inch screen if I was lucky,' he says. Consider yourself fortunate if you manage to catch Havoc in a theater, but if not, don't worry: the action hits just as hard on your television set. A prime example is the carnage that breaks out at the Medusa, a nightclub where Charlie and his girlfriend, Mia (Quelin Sepulveda), are converged on by 'big sister's' forces, Walker, and Walker's shady colleague, Vincent (Timothy Olyphant), who wants to get Charlie first for his own reasons. 'The Medusa sequence was probably the biggest thing I've undertaken, in terms of sustaining that pace, sustaining the movement of the action sequence across the different levels inside the tunnel, back outside, out into the streets,' Evans says. 'Maintaining the POVs throughout the sequence was the biggest headache.' The hardest part of shooting the Medusa sequence turned out to be COVID; production took place during the summer of 2021 in Cardiff, meaning several hundred folks on set had to be tested before the cameras rolled. Coronavirus aside, Evans makes filming itself sound like a walk in the park. 'Because I work with such a great stunt team, led by Jude Poyer [who served as action designer & stunt coordinator on Gangs of London ], and because we do a previsualization process, by the time we get to the set, it allows me to have a hell of a framework to build off. The heavy lifting is almost done then.' All of this makes the personal confessions between Yeo and Whitaker read as the heavier lift. 'Big sister' and Beaumont are alphas in their respective worlds, of Triad society and American politics; they maintain fronts with their subordinates and peers to assert their power and status. In private, those rules are relaxed. 'For this one moment in time, because there's no one else around, I can let these characters be vulnerable,' Evans says. The poignancy is fleeting–there's still a half an hour of Havoc left to go, and it doesn't go quietly–but makes its impact nonetheless.
The Guardian
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
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.
South China Morning Post
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Netflix's Havoc director on how the Tom Hardy thriller is an ode to Hong Kong action films
Welsh filmmaker Gareth Evans burst onto the action scene with The Raid (2011) and The Raid 2 (2014), a bone-crushing brace of visceral Indonesian martial arts films that propelled its leading men to international stardom. Advertisement His new film, Havoc, stars Tom Hardy and trades the sweaty streets of Jakarta for a gritty unnamed city on the United States' east coast in the midst of a blood-soaked gang war. Shooting the film in the UK was a gruelling process stalled by the Covid-19 pandemic, union strikes and clashing schedules. But Havoc arrives on Netflix on April 25, with an international cast including Timothy Olyphant, Jessie Mei Li , Sunny Pang and Yeo Yann Yann. Speaking to the Post, Evans says Havoc is his love letter to the so-called heroic bloodshed film genre – which came out of Hong Kong and often features police officers and criminals who are two sides of the same coin – and speaks enthusiastically about the influence of Hong Kong cinema on his style. Advertisement
Wales Online
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wales Online
Tom Hardy stars in 'bloodbath' Netflix thriller with the year's 'best action'
Tom Hardy takes on totally different role in 'bloodbath' Netflix thriller with the year's 'best action sequences' Tom Hardy stars in a brutal new Netflix thriller hitting the streaming service later this week British film sensation Tom Hardy takes his love for adrenaline-fueled roles to new heights in Netflix's latest high-octane thriller, Havoc, directed by the visionary Gareth Evans. The Welsh director is revered for helming the wildly successful martial arts epics The Raid and The Raid 2, and he's also the creative force behind Sky's riveting crime saga Gangs of London. Evans now joins forces with the star of Mad Max: Fury Road and Venom for a heart-stopping tale about a battle-hardened detective embroiled in a seedy criminal underworld. In Havoc, Hardy portrays Walker, a tormented detective tasked with rescuing a politician's alienated son from a cabal of dangerous criminals and hired killers. The Peaky Blinders frontman fully immersed himself into some of Netflix's most extraordinary action sequences, all masterfully orchestrated by Evans' prowess in crafting cinematic mayhem, reports the Express. Article continues below Tom Hardy stars in one of his grittiest roles yet (Image: (Image: NETFLIX) ) Speaking on whether Hardy gained any new abilities as a result of the production, Evans revealed to Express Online, "I think so. I think it was a different experience for him." He also added, "One of the things that was brilliant about bringing Tom on board was that I knew that all of the action components existed within my wheelhouse." Not only did Hardy and his regular stunt collaborator Jacob Tomuri play a pivotal role in the authentic execution of Havoc's raw combat scenes, but Hardy himself contributed significant personal input in developing his character's complex psyche. "But what was great about working with Tom is that we could do this intense deep dive into character, a deep dive into Walker," Evans continued. "We started mining for things we could play and explore within the film. The trauma and the guilt that kind of haunts him as a character, that all came from discussions with Tom. He was looking for the other elements to it. "I approached him saying, 'I've got this blistering action film that is set with an influence of that 70s American vibe', so he latched onto that and said, 'Great, now let's bring more of an emotional element to the character'. "So, when you get those big set pieces, there's story and character being told at the same time as the spectacle of the set piece." The film also stars Jessie Mei Li as Walker's partner Ellie, alongside Hollywood heavyweights Timothy Olyphant and Forest Whitaker. Havoc has already drawn comparisons to the John Wick series and could potentially launch a new franchise for Netflix. Get ready for some of the best action sequences of the year (Image: (Image: NETFLIX) ) Watch Black Mirror on Netflix for free with Sky This article contains affiliate links, we will receive a commission on any sales we generate from it. Learn more from £15 Sky Get the deal here Product Description Sky is giving away a free Netflix subscription with its new Sky Stream TV bundles, including the £15 Essential TV plan. This lets members watch live and on-demand TV content without a satellite dish or aerial and includes hit shows like Black Mirror and You. For fans who have enjoyed seeing Hardy in roles such as the symbiotic anti-hero Eddie Brock/Venom or as hardened criminals the Kray twins in Legend, they should definitely watch him in one of his most complex roles yet. Reviews are already pouring in for the thriller, which will be available on Netflix later this week. Mitchell Beaupre described it as "a relentlessly brutal neo-noir punctuated by two of the best action sequences of the decade". Barry Hertz of The Globe and Mail praised the film's extensive four-year production as "worth it", sharing on X (formerly Twitter): "This is a squib-heavy bloodbath that's mythic, messy, manic. "Missing THE RAID 2's Mad Dog flavor (and that film's enjoyably dense gangland-war narrative), but when it rips, it rips so hard." Article continues below Havoc will be released Friday, 25th April on Netflix.
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Long-Awaited ‘Havoc' Trailer Sees Tom Hardy Causing Chaos
'Havoc' is finally here. Almost. The underworld thriller starring Tom Hardy was announced back in 2021 and it arrives on Netflix on April 25. And now you can watch the brand-new, bone-crunching teaser below. 'Havoc' hails from writer/director Gareth Evans, who wrote and directed modern action classics 'The Raid' and 'The Raid 2.' His last film was the underrated 2018 Netflix folk horror film 'Apostle,' starring Dan Stevens as a man searching for his missing sister on an island gripped by a strange cult. He also co-created 'Gangs of London,' the cult series based on the PlayStation game. The official logline for 'Havoc' reads: 'Walker (Tom Hardy) is a bruised detective fighting his way through the criminal underworld threatening to engulf his entire city. In the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong, Walker finds himself with a number of factions on his tail; a vengeful crime syndicate, a crooked politician, as well as his fellow cops. When attempting to rescue the politician's estranged son, whose involvement in the drug deal starts to unravel a deep web of corruption and conspiracy, he is forced to confront the demons of his past.' The trailer, backed by Fontaines D.C.'s 'Starburster,' promises the kind of nonstop action that Evans is known for. Beyond Hardy, the cast includes Jessie Mei Li, Justin Cornwell, Quelin Sepulveda, Luis Guzmán, Michelle Waterson, Sunny Pang, Jim Caesar, Xelia Mendes-Jones with Yeo Yann Yann, Timothy Olyphant and Forest Whitaker. 'Havoc' premieres April 25 on Netflix. The post Long-Awaited 'Havoc' Trailer Sees Tom Hardy Causing Chaos appeared first on TheWrap.
