Brimming with action archetypes — the grizzled hero, the upstart deputy, renegade police, a crooked politician and young lovers on the run — the writer-director Gareth Evans’s gritty crime movie “Havoc” makes it hard to find anyone in it who feels like a real person.
The clichés commence with Walker (Tom Hardy), a sadder, more deflated John McClane type estranged from his wife and daughter at Christmastime. In the film’s opening, Walker, speaking with a low grumble similar to the one Hardy uses for playing Venom, laments his unscrupulous life. “You live in this world, you make choices,” he says. “And for a while it works. Until you make a choice that renders you worthless.”
A cop-turned-fixer for the mayoral candidate Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker), Walker is called into service when Beaumont’s troubled son, Charlie (Justin Cornwell), and his girlfriend, Mia (Quelin Sepulveda), are implicated in a high-speed chase that put a cop in the hospital. They’re also tied to the murder of a high-ranking Yakuza gangster. Beaumont needs Walker to retrieve Charlie before vindictive cops like Vincent (Timothy Olyphant) or the vengeful mother (Yeo Yann Yann) of the slain hoodlum find him. In return, Beaumont will release Walker from any further debts.
Following the one-last-job path, “Havoc” offers few surprises, taking nearly an hour to map its huge web of characters. In the meantime, Walker leans on paid informants and his upstart partner, Ellie (Jessie Mei Li), to provide him with witnesses, such as Mia’s resourceful uncle (a scene-stealing Luis Guzmán). The gritty rendering of this crime-riddled city, aesthetically recalling “Sin City,” but in color, provides some additional background stimulation. Still, “Havoc” is mostly shifting around characters to bide time until its gory set pieces.
Because what “Havoc” lacks in characters and story, it delivers in two audacious waves of indiscriminate killing that are so bruising and relentless they make the “John Wick” movies look like “Sesame Street.” In the first blood-soaked brawl, Walker finds Mia and Charlie at a club. Unfortunately, so do Vincent and the Japanese gangsters. The four parties collide. With his background as an action choreographer, Evans, who directed the “Raid” films, can artfully craft long elaborate action while maintaining coherency. Walker swings a metal pipe, Mia (Sepulveda’s physicality is impressive) wields a cleaver and others blanket the neon-lit party space with bursts of gunfire.
The film’s final skirmish, this time with Walker, Charlie and Mia holed up in a woodland cabin, is equally exhilarating. There are goons crashing through windows and coming up through the floorboards, harpoons and hooks used as weapons. Whip pans instill some moments with a crazed franticness, while slow motion in other instances gives the vicious violence an intoxicating glow. Though the characters in “Havoc” are forgettable, the carnage is gripping.
Havoc
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
