Havoc
Review by Mark Woodring
Tom Hardy and action movies go together like peanut butter and jelly; it’s just such a delicious combination, it’s unfathomable that someone could put one together that wasn’t fantastic.
**NOTE: You can read Mark’s review below, bur remember, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
107 Minutes, Rated TV-MA
Written and Directed by Gareth Evans
Synopsis:
After a drug deal gone wrong, a bruised detective must fight his way through the criminal underworld to rescue a politician’s estranged son, unraveling a deep web of corruption and conspiracy that ensnares his entire city.
Therefore, I find it an unbelievable thing that Gareth Evans, who wrote and directed two of the most respected action films of recent memory (The Raid: Redemption and The Raid 2), has somehow managed to write and direct this, this… thing which is masquerading as a movie.
Look, I get that development was delayed twice due to reshoots and the writers’ strike, but my God, what a travesty.
Opening with a CGI big rig/police car chase which is so badly constructed and rendered that it belongs on a Saturday morning cartoon instead of a Hollywood production with a (presumably) big budget.
Havoc tries desperately to rise above it’s by the numbers tropes; from crooked cop, to crooked businessman, to idealistic young officer, to gang warfare (both internal and intra-gang), Havoc doesn’t skimp on its trip to the cliche buffet and hasn’t the shame to prevent it from going back for seconds.
An overly (and unnecessarily) complex “plot” involving previous wrong doings by our protagonist (Hardy), blackmail, and guilt, bogs down the usually reliable performances by Tom Hardy, excellent villain Timothy Olyphant, and the great Forest Whitaker in a morass of mediocrity (at best).
Character motivations, when we learn them, are told to us, never shown, and always in the most basic of dialogic exchanges between characters, where we learn that “X will do Y because of Z.”
It’s shockingly bad writing.
And the action? Well…
Never have so many rounds been fired without hitting a human being… but when they must, they explode in flying bodies and more blood than should be possible. The fights scenes are terribly choreographed, then just as equally terribly shot, which only layers the disappointment of the audience at sitting through the “character” moments just to end up with such muddy planning and execution…
Look, it’s not a great film, by any stretch of the imagination. To even call it “Good” would be more than generous. “Fair” is probably closer to the truth, but even that would be more likely due to an affection for the cast (Hardy, Olyphant, Whitaker) than the movie itself.
See it or Skip it? Skip it.
Havoc is now streaming on Netflix and stars Tom Hardy, Jessie Mei Li, Justin Cornwell, Quelin Sepulveda, Timothy Olyphant, and Forest Whitaker.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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