Gareth Evans is a filmmaker who gained attention with “The Raid: Redemption” (2012), a brutal action extravaganza in which rookie Indonesian cop Rama (Iko Uwais) was forced to punch, kick, shoot, stab and otherwise decimate a seemingly endless array of violent thugs in order to get to freedom when a SWAT team raid of an apartment building serving as the safe house for a ruthless crime boss went sideways. It was made with a certain undeniable energy and if nearly two hours of sustained gruesome mayhem was your thing, it more or less delivered the goods. Evans followed this with “The Raid 2” (2014), which picked up shortly after the events of its predecessor and found Rama going undercover to bring down both a criminal syndicate and corrupt cops and seemed to have been designed to answer the burning question: “How many people can be messily dispatched over the course of a staggering 150-minute run time?” (Answer: A lot.) Now Evans has returned with “Havoc” and while the runtime may be about 45 minutes shorter than “The Raid 2,” the body count this time around might actually be higher.
Set in an unnamed urban landscape that looks like a discount Gotham City, the film stars Tom Hardy as Walker, a man who may be a corrupt cop and a bad father but at least he feels a little bad about it, so he almost becomes the story’s moral center by default. Anyway, when not doing dirty deeds with a group of similarly corrupt cops led by Vincent (Timothy Olyphant), he also serves as a fixer for corrupt local politician Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker). When Beaumont’s estranged son Charlie (Justin Cornwell) and a couple of friends are fingered for the murder of the son of the local Chinese criminal syndicate, he implores Walker to get him out of town and to safety. Over the course of one long night, Walker tries to track Charlie and his girlfriend Mia (Quelin Sepulveda) while fending off armies of triad toughs and his former colleagues, aided only by smart and idealistic rookie cop Ellie (Jessie Mei Li).
Of course, as was the case in Evans’s previous films, the narrative is little more than an excuse to string together a number of sequences in which armies of stuntmen lay waste to each other using every possible means imaginable as well as a few that might have eluded even the most dedicated sadists. Here, although there hardly seems to be a single scene that doesn’t involve someone getting butchered in some way, there are three extended set pieces of note. Early on, there is a chaotic chase sequence in which washing machines are deployed as weaponry. Later on, there is a melee at a club in which limbs are hacked off, skulls are shattered and beloved character actor Luis Guzman gets to mow down a bunch of punks. The climax finds all the still-living members of the cast coming together at Walker’s cabin in the woods for a guns-blazing finale where all the various scores are finally settled, no one ever seems to need to reload and the blood splatters prettily onto the snow. (Oh yeah, it is also a Christmas movie, because why not.)
Even if you discount how utterly formulaic Evans’s screenplay is in regards to its clunky story in which nothing ever seems to be at stake and unsympathetic cardboard characters or how it wastes such charismatic performers as Hardy, Whitaker and Olyphant or how the whole thing has an ugly and unconvincing faux-gritty sheen that looks like a “Grand Theft Auto” knockoff designed on a computer in need of debugging and focus entirely on the action beats, “Havoc” still comes up short. Evans tries to replicate the wild chaos of peak John Woo but while he certainly supplies an equal amount of bullets and blood (though the CGI gore on display is fairly terrible throughout), he never comes close to approximating the balletic grace and personality that Woo brought to his scenes that made them so striking and beautiful to behold.
Even those who admired the “Raid” films for their style and heedlessness might find this to be little more than an accumulation of action movie cliches that they have seen enacted to much greater effect in other and certainly better films. Perhaps the best thing about it in the end is that it is so utterly forgettable that after a week or two, it will simply disappear into the vast Netflix algorithm like so many other mediocre action epics of late and only be uncovered by soon-to-be-disappointed people who thought they had stumbled upon that Anne Hathaway movie of the same name.
