Havoc

Cop cliches keep this drama from being arresting cinema

Tom Hardy does his best in this cliche cop drama.

Walker (Tom Hardy) is a cop with a few secrets. Walker was fine being a corrupt narcotics cop and stealing money until he did something he considers unforgivable. To make amends, he transfers to homicide and tries to be “good police”.

Apparently, turning himself in wasn’t an option for making amends…

When a gang war kicks off between the major narcotics runners in the city, Walker presumes his old crew is back in action. To make things right, he’ll have to fight his way through the worst of the worst.

Basically this is a made-for-TV The Raid movie.

Director Gareth Evans was never able to surpass the greatness he achieved with his first two major releases: The Raid and The Raid 2. Both movies were a marriage of beautiful action sequences and melodramatic storytelling. Think John Wick in a Malaysian setting. Havoc is a pale imitation of Evans’ Raid series, with clunky action sequences and even flimsier storytelling. It seems he’s even lost the ability to film an extended action sequence, as the fighting in Havoc is slow, jumbled, and hard to understand.

Part of the problem is the casting. Yes, Hardy is physically more than capable of roughing people up, but gun battles just never hold the screen as well as the visceral thrill of hand-to-hand combat. While The Raid looked gritty and brutal, Havoc is incoherent and bloody. Hardy does his best to inject pathos into the role, but with such basic characterization, it’s a waste of his abilities. It also doesn’t help that the setting is some nebulous city in America. Hardy’s accent, always fascinating when he tries to be American, is no help in pinpointing a location. We’ll call the city some form of vague New York, though it’s pretty clear it was shot in Europe to save money.

Beyond shoddy filmmaking and nebulous acting, there’s nothing more to look at with Havoc. The script feels like a ChatGPT prompt. If you asked the AI to write you a cliché corrupt cop drama, it would be damn close to the plotting of Havoc.

But since the locations are fake, the acting is weak, and the story is uninteresting, what is there left to care about? It’s hard to feel anything when watching Havoc, other than boredom. I found myself wondering if this is what Jack Quaid’s character in Novocaine felt in his daily life.

Verdict: Just watch The Raid.

Havoc is rated R and is available April 25 on Netflix