Havoc (2025)

Bent policeman Walker (Tom Hardy) is in more than one kind of trouble. Domestically, he’s not only divorced but a horrible father, the kind of dad who somehow manages to forget that old obscure tradition of buying one’s spawn decent presents for Christmas.

He’s also involved in decidedly shady business with a group of colleagues lead by a character played by Timothy Olyphant (still one of Tolkien’s finest) that may or may not have involved some amount of cop killing in the near past. Furthermore, because he’s flexible in all kinds of bad directions, Walker is also beholden to real estate mogul and mayoral candidate Beaumont (Forest Whitaker), who has some sort of hold over him beyond just Walker being on the take.

The consequences of all of these different corruptions will come crashing down on what goes for our protagonist here when Beaumont’s son Wes (Jim Caesar) and Wes’s girlfriend Mia (Quelin Sepulveda) are at the wrong place at the wrong time and become witnesses and suspects in the rather spectacular murder of a triad boss. Soon, the triads – the killed boss’s mom is a real piece of work -, the other corrupt cops, and the real cops are after the couple. Beaumont only wants his son to live, and if that means involving Walker, that’s going to happen. Apart from an ever-growing amount of violence, there will be betrayal and confused loyalties, as one should expect.

Gareth Evans, as much as I love his first three films, is a much better action director than is he one of complex narratives, so Havoc’s first forty or fifty minutes are somewhat heavy going, with a dozen or so characters whose relationships – and even names – are often much more confusingly presented than is necessary. It’s not that their relations or the budding plot are lacking interest, but the pacing of the introductory scenes feels off and the storytelling lacks in clarity without a need for it to do so.

Once the various groups of assholes and morally bankrupt shitbags begin murdering each other – at more than one point in three or for way fights – Evans finds ample opportunity to demonstrate his brilliance at staging action scenes that are frenetic, chaotic, spectacularly, sometime poetically, violent, and absolutely controlled. While he’s putting a heavy emphasis on fast cuts and jittery camera work, Evans doesn’t use these stylistic elements to obfuscate weaknesses in the stunt work – as a matter of fact, all the havoc (sorry) and chaos on display is also clear and wonderfully easy to parse. This is just a guy directing the hell out of these scenes because the stuntpeople aren’t the only ones allowed to have fun.

The film’s visual style goes for a version of the neo noir – the city is clothed in the colours of darkness and neon, beset by digital grain for neither rain nor snow are going to touch this particular Christmas – and everyone living in it seems to have taken on the moral qualities this suggests. This America, not unlike the real one, is dominated by two things – money and violence – and any kind of innocence or genuine human feeling is bound to get a character killed nastily rather sooner than later. Even redemption, of a kind, is found only under a mound of dead bodies.

There’s no place like America today, as the poet said.