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.

Three Films Make A Post: World War III Begins on Your Toy Shelf

Venom (2018): Well-liked at least by the better nerd critics and surprisingly successful, I’m the odd man out who just loathed this thing by Ruben Fleischer. But then, I had no time for the director’s Zombieland either and feel that the two films share the same problems: scripts that never develop any kind of dramatic pull; a lead character who is a whiny self-centred little shit (Tom Hardy of course doing his whiny little shit with an accent) who never learns anything from his mistakes; jokes that never hit for me and supposedly dramatic scenes that make me snigger sarcastically. Add to Venom’s problems Riz Ahmed’s generically boring and unfunny villain and action scenes that are in the lower third of contemporary superhero spectacle, and you really find my puzzled about what I’m supposed to like here? Okay, the film does have more to do for its non-powered female lead than typical and has the good taste to cast Michelle Williams, but that’s all I found to enjoy here. It’s still better than Deadpool, mind you.

Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween (2018): And the bad mood cinema continues with Sony’s attempt to make the first movie again, but cheaper and worse. So the script is a worse budget version of the first one with less interesting ideas, fewer fun set pieces, and no clever bits at all; Jack Black’s worse; the rest of the cast is so unmemorable, they make the decent one of the first movie look brilliant by comparison; the moral is more treacly; the PG horror more PG and less horrific; and Ari Sandel’s direction shows about as much personality as (please imagine me looking around my apartment for the thing in it with the least personality) a door knob.

Apostle (2018): Compared to the other two films in this entry, Gareth Evans’s worst film, a Netflix production about a man (Dan Stevens) with a laudanum habit going undercover on a cult-owned island to rescue his kidnapped sister and encountering worse things than just cultists, is sheer brilliance. Well, actually, it isn’t, really, but at least it is a film with certain ambitions that more often than not demonstrates actual interest in the art of filmmaking. The acting is generally strong (with Stevens, who is often relegated to clear-cut guys with little personality but can do quite a bit more when he’s allowed to, a fine stand-out), the script provides an interestingly skewed tale of guilt, redemption and responsibility, the cult and what it does turns out to be rather made for the lover of Weird Fiction, and Evans creates a fine mood of dread and paranoia. The film’s big problem is its sluggish pace, with too many scenes reiterating things the audience has already understood, slowing things to a crawl for no good reason on more than one occasion.


It’s still a worthwhile film, mind you, but shave at least twenty minutes of its 130 minute running time, and you might have a great one.

In short: The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

After watching the final film of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, I've worked through various pieces of criticism about it, and I have to agree with about fifty percent of it. So yes, I agree this is a perhaps overlong, often overreaching and internally conflicted film. However, I actually think these things aren't bugs here, they are features; indeed they are for me what makes this a great film.

The thing with the film's overreaching, the way it wants to be about three or four films at once (one of them even a superhero version of A Tale of Two Cities) really comes down to what you expect of your multi-multi-million dollar movies: a tight, slick product, or an actual creative endeavour that sometimes won't be able to fulfil everything it tries, but that makes up for the moments - in this case about twenty percent of the time - when it fails with a willingness to go to interesting, sometimes even surprising, places between the spectacle and loud melodrama the blockbuster business affords. In other words, if we as an audience want our mainstream entertainment to take risks, we also have to accept that not everything in it will work out perfectly and slickly, that there will be roughness, but also honest excitement and actual ideas when things work out, which is what happens in about eighty percent of the movie.

The Dark Knight Rises is a film full of conflicting impulses in its narrative, its politics, its emotions, even its concept of heroism; despite being a superhero movie, it's a film lacking moral certainty (especially in the few moments when it pretends to have it). Things here are messy, and clear-cut answers are not to be found; this is about striving and asking questions, and questioning answers which for my tastes fits the character of Batman much better than making him a barrel-chested 70s love god and international adventurer or a grim and gritty psychopath. It's these cracks and the breaks in the film's structure and meaning that truly make the film work for me, its imperfections working as a reflection of the messiness of reality as well as the messiness of dreams.

Despite the remaining prevalence of Michael Baysian crap, it's a pretty exciting time for blockbuster cinema right now, when movies as different and great in their own ways like this or The Avengers can be made and will be watched by millions, movies that have no problems with pushing all the spectacle buttons while still being ambitious and aggressively non-dumb.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,christopher nolan,christian bale,gary oldman,tom hardy,joseph gordon-levitt,anne hathaway,marion cotillard,michael caine,superheroes,sf