Why Havoc‘s Most Crucial Scene Is Also Its Subtlest One

Nestled in the back half of Gareth Evans’ Havoc, a stunningly violent film that does exactly what it says on the tin, two parents sit down for an unexpected heart to heart about weariness and woe. 

One of them is corrupt politician Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker), who longs to reconcile with his estranged son, Charlie (Justin Cornwell). The other is a vicious gang boss (Yeo Yann Yann), never acknowledged by a given name, but by her status in Triad society (“big sister”); officially, she is credited as “Tsui’s mother.” She’s in the middle of orchestrating a revenge campaign on behalf of her son, Tsui (Jeremy Ang Jones), cut down early in the film during a drug deal gone bad, though his killers see it as having gone precisely according to plan.

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As she and Beaumont unexpectedly open up to one another, tipping out the hopes and dreams they have, or had, for their children, Havoc slows down and lets a hush settle in, replacing bedlam and bullet reports–a spare sentimental beat in a film where feelings are inconveniences at best and liabilities at worst. It’s a gripping, savage piece of work on account of its raucous and intense action, but it’s the quiet parts that help drive the loud ones home.

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Latching onto characters

Moments like that are as key to Evans’ cinema as the athletically made and kinetically shot melees he became known for in 2011, when his third feature, The Raid, made its world premiere at the year’s edition of the Toronto International Film Festival to instant hosannas; the film is action cinema’s take on the chamber drama, where an Indonesian police squad is trapped in an apartment complex and beset on by gang members and its residents alike. Enough jaw-dropping critical injuries are sustained by characters in The Raid to overcrowd the Pitt. Still, the emotional undercurrents help pull viewers along.

“Every time I’ve written anything, even though the characters always exist in a world and with circumstances that feel larger than life, there’s always an emphasis on trying to find an element of the storyline or the relationship between the characters that I can latch onto,” Evans explains in a conversation with TIME. In his post-The Raid projects especially, including its 2014 sequel, The Raid 2, his first collaboration with Netflix, 2018’s Apostle, and his 2020 Sky Atlantic TV series Gangs of London, Evans looks for avenues he can channel his personal anxieties through.

Typically, his concerns are parental. The Raid 2, for instance, a two and a half hour crime and punishment epic, boils down to one man’s struggle to win the approval of his stern father; whether this is significant to Evans’ life or not, the motif nonetheless transitions cleanly into Havoc. More than a decade has passed since then, and Evans now has a child of his own–a life change he reflects on directly through Havoc’s themes. “It was always about mining the fear of what it means to raise [children] properly,” he says, “and what it means to question every little decision.” Parents will keep themselves awake at night wondering what path their kids will take as they grow up, and whether they’ve steered them toward a good one (much less taught them the wisdom to take it). It’s a natural consequence of his own parenthood that emerges in Evans’ work, but the neurosis he mines is universal.

Parenting with pain

Granted, Evans isn’t a high-ranking member in China’s organized crime hierarchy, or a dirty mayoral candidate, or a crooked police officer, like Walker (Tom Hardy), Havoc’s troubled antihero, a hard-boiled detective wracked by guilt over the initially undisclosed sins of his past; Beaumont enlists him to track down Charlie, who has been framed for Tsui’s slaying and is thus on his mother’s hit list. 

The “fretting parent” motif manifests in Walker’s arc, too. He and his wife are separated, and he dearly wants to spend more time with their daughter; his ex is reluctant, given his dangerous profession and overall amorality. His habit of buying gifts at the last minute doesn’t help. (The movie introduces him shopping for his daughter’s Christmas present at a bodega as the holiday looms. Nobody’s perfect, perhaps corrupt cops especially.) 

Walker, Tsui’s mother, and Beaumont’s individual distresses are grounded in Havoc’s structure and action. They make up the film’s beating heart, carrying the burdens of their regret; it’s their own fault that their children keep distance from them. Beaumont aches to close that distance, while “big sister” is consumed by the tragic reality that Tsui’s death means she’ll never close it.  “At what point is it too late?” Evans asks. “At what point do you give in? Who has the resolve to keep fighting for that?” 

Action cinema’s compact is deceptively simple: show the audience well-choreographed fights, whether they’re conducted by hand, gun, or other martial implements, and they’ll be happy. But action sans thought–recent examples include The 355 and A Working Man–amounts to disposable mayhem at best, like cottony candy that knocks your teeth out instead of just rotting them. In the case of Havoc, giving “big sister” and Beaumont personalities as well as motivation prevents the narrative from tipping into nihilism (an attention to characterization which, frankly, applies to all of Evans’ films). “Everyone’s got shades of gray. Everyone’s fallible,” Evans says. “It was always important to find little touchstones, where you can say, ‘There’s humanity there, there’s still something to hold onto.’ Otherwise it’s just pain.” 

Storytelling and character development through action

The dialogue between Beaumont and “big sister” functions like a Tylenol tablet, a few minutes of mercy in a movie it’s broadly absent from. “Big sister” doesn’t believe in due process; she believes that Charlie murdered Tsui, and she acts accordingly. (“‘Play this like you’re the hero of your own movie,” Evans recalls telling Yann.) Beaumont leverages his knowledge of Walker’s past misdeeds to strong-arm him into recovering Charlie. For his part, Walker wants to leave those misdeeds behind him, and in Evans’ calculus, that, coupled with his tough-guy reticence, makes him the wrong character for driving home Havoc’s parenting theme.

Hence “big sister” and Beaumont’s exchange in the film’s third act. Evans didn’t plan it, per se; he realized, naturally, that these characters, in this particular moment, were right for punctuating that theme. “The set piece has to feel like it’s organic, that it comes from the characters,” Evans says. “It’s not just because we’re on page six or 10 or whatever, that we’re going to drop in a moment of spectacle.” 

Small presentation, big impact

In Havoc’s ratcheting chaos, even a scene of two characters talking calmly does feel spectacular. Evans saw this seemingly minor sequence as an opportunity for Yeo and Whitaker to give their characters pathos, and took it. But there’s a practical reason for “big sister” and Beaumont to speak with one another at this point in the story, too: to set up that last half hour. “It felt like, in the construct overall, a sobering moment to have within this film,” Evans notes, “which is admittedly a rollercoaster ride with big action sequences.”

Without further context, he could be describing any of his movies. Every Evans production is an amusement park ride with a body count. But Havoc is closer to Gangs of London than The Raid 2; that movie contains a critical mass of action sequences, and as Evans puts it, “a lot of deleted scenes that I probably shouldn’t have spent money shooting.” He focused on economy of action with Havoc instead, emphasizing world-building geography and characters ahead of explosive action, which is consequently as impressive in scale as even The Raid and The Raid 2’s standout sequences. 

Forget, by the way, that you’ll be watching Havoc on a smaller screen. Like every child of the 1980s with a lifelong love of genre cinema, Evans encountered the likes of Sam Peckinpah, Akira Kurosawa, and golden age Hong Kong martial arts cinema not in a theater, but at home. “The first time I watched them would’ve been pan and scan on a 21-inch screen if I was lucky,” he says. Consider yourself fortunate if you manage to catch Havoc in a theater, but if not, don’t worry: the action hits just as hard on your television set.

A prime example is the carnage that breaks out at the Medusa, a nightclub where Charlie and his girlfriend, Mia (Quelin Sepulveda), are converged on by “big sister’s” forces, Walker, and Walker’s shady colleague, Vincent (Timothy Olyphant), who wants to get Charlie first for his own reasons. “The Medusa sequence was probably the biggest thing I’ve undertaken, in terms of sustaining that pace, sustaining the movement of the action sequence across the different levels inside the tunnel, back outside, out into the streets,” Evans says. “Maintaining the POVs throughout the sequence was the biggest headache.”

The hardest part of shooting the Medusa sequence turned out to be COVID; production took place during the summer of 2021 in Cardiff, meaning several hundred folks on set had to be tested before the cameras rolled. Coronavirus aside, Evans makes filming itself sound like a walk in the park. “Because I work with such a great stunt team, led by Jude Poyer [who served as action designer & stunt coordinator on Gangs of London], and because we do a previsualization process, by the time we get to the set, it allows me to have a hell of a framework to build off. The heavy lifting is almost done then.”

All of this makes the personal confessions between Yeo and Whitaker read as the heavier lift. “Big sister” and Beaumont are alphas in their respective worlds, of Triad society and American politics; they maintain fronts with their subordinates and peers to assert their power and status. In private, those rules are relaxed. “For this one moment in time, because there’s no one else around, I can let these characters be vulnerable,” Evans says. The poignancy is fleeting–there’s still a half an hour of Havoc left to go, and it doesn’t go quietly–but makes its impact nonetheless.

Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers film, music and being a dad for way too many outlets. You can find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.