Havoc Feels Like a Grand Theft Auto Adaptation (Derogatory)
Havoc takes place in a grimy American metropolis that’s part Chicago, part Detroit, and part Gotham City. This is by design, though I’m also not convinced the production could have aimed for geographic specificity if it wanted to. Havoc may be set in the U.S., but it was shot in Wales, where its writer-director Gareth Evans is from. Its main character, a corrupt homicide detective named Walker, is played by English actor Tom Hardy in a variation on the knock-around nasal accent he came up with for Capone and hasn’t been entirely able to shake since, a tough-guy inflection more grounded in the big screen than in any real-life region. Adding to the sense of geographic untetheredness is a heavy coterie of Canto-speaking triad members, whose steel-spined leader, played by Yeo Yann Yann, is credited only as “Tsui’s Mother” in reference to the slain son she arrives from abroad to avenge. The idea of a location that embodies the mash-up of influences Evans is drawing on, from ’90s Hong Kong action to Michael Mann, may sound cool. But the actual effect is that of a world set in Grand Theft Auto, a backdrop that doesn’t feel like a living, breathing place so much as a set of locations that its characters bounce between on missions.
Video games have, for better and worse, been a steady undercurrent in Evans’s career. His breakthrough was 2011’s The Raid, the second of the three films he’s made with Iko Uwais, an Indonesian martial artist Evans met when shooting a doc about silat and whose physical skills and gravitas on-camera have since led to roles in Expend4bles and Peter Berg’s Mile 22. A bruising movie with a simple premise, The Raid operates on game logic, casting Uwais as a rookie police officer who has to fight his way up and down the levels of an apartment block occupied by a drug lord and his gang. When Evans made his first foray into TV in 2020, it was with Gangs of London, a series adaptation of a 2006 game about warring criminal crews in the city. But whenever Havoc brings gaming to mind, it’s never in a good way. The movie is overstuffed with outsize warring elements. There’s the collection of dirty cops that Walker used to run with (led by a sneering Timothy Olyphant), as well as a quartet of amateur thieves headed up by Charlie (Justin Cornwell), the estranged son of crooked mayoral candidate Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker), who end up way over their heads when a drug deal goes wrong.
On the triad side, Sunny Pang is Ching, who resents being passed over as head of the syndicate’s local operations in favor of the boss’s son Tsui (Jeremy Ang Jones), while Michelle Waterson steals the show as the wordless enforcer who accompanies the grieving leader when she shows up to figure out what happened. Then there’s Jessie Mei Li as Ellie, the idealistic beat cop assigned to accompany a begrudging Walker on what turns out to be a very eventful night out. The only one of these characters who gets enough screen time to be remotely developed is Walker, and despite Hardy infusing the guy with weary workingman soulfulness that brings to mind his 2013 solo show Locke, Walker’s still just a collection of stereotypes — estranged from his embittered wife, trying ineptly to do right by his kid, and unwilling to let anyone in on the secrets that have been eroding his life. Yeo, with even less to work with, fares a little better with her stony matriarch character, doing a lot with a simple tilt of her face to the sky and a single tear. But the final act hinges on being invested in the fates of Charlie and his girlfriend Mia (Quelin Sepulveda), who make terrible decisions and are too grown to deserve the grace given to dumb kids.
Evans knows his way around an action sequence, and the best ones in Havoc take place in a night club (naturally) and a cabin on a lake outside of town, where these different clans come into collision in a rain of bullets and bodies being thrown over balconies. Havoc gets in a few memorable shots outside of those set pieces — an assault on a car in traffic is neatly staged, and an opening car chase makes use of an impossible mobile camera that tracks alongside the vehicles like an extra participant. But it’s too easy to drift away from Havoc, which is convoluted without being complex and busy without being interesting. Evans has assembled a worthy cast and has crammed his film full of what should be fun elements, and yet the final result is weirdly without joy — akin to filling your plate with all your favorite foods at a buffet, only to sit down and realize you have no appetite to eat it.