Havoc (Netflix) - Review

Hello everybody and welcome to my review of Havoc, which is the latest original film streaming right now on Netflix. Havoc is from director Gareth Evans, who is not Gareth Edwards, the guy who made Godzilla and Rogue One and the Creator. Gareth Evans is the guy who made The Raid and The Raid 2, which just happened to be two of my favorite action movies of all time. This is his first film in seven years and Havoc was shot four years ago, but was delayed due to strikes interfering with the scheduling of reshoots for the film. It's been a long wait for Gareth Evans' new film, but in my opinion, I think it was worth it. Now I have to say right up front, I love a good action movie. I'm an easy mark for a really well done action film. And when I say good, I don't just mean good in the overall action genre, but an action movie that's good at being what it wants to be or what it's trying to be. And there are lots of different kinds of action movies. You have cheesy with a heart, kind of like last year's Carry On, another Netflix film, peak 80s action movies like Predator and Die Hard, the so bad on purpose, it's good action movies like Commando and Roadhouse, to what I think are legitimately good action films like the John Wick movies. Almost every genre out there has several sub-genres inside of it. And I think that if you can make a movie that nails one of those sub-genres well, then fans of that are gonna be very happy. Havoc is well titled because it falls into an action sub-genre that I like to call chaos. It's the kind of movie that John Woo helped to introduce to the United States with movies like Hard Boiled and The Killer back in the 90s, then made some of his own in Hollywood, most notably Face Off. Edgar Wright parodied this brilliantly in Hot Fuzz. And this is also where Gareth Evans made his name with The Raid Redemption and The Raid 2. I think he's the best Hong Kong action director who didn't actually work in Hong Kong. In Havoc, Tom Hardy plays a cop who gets mixed up in a multi-front gang war on Christmas Eve. Yes, like many great action movies, this goes on the list as a non-traditional Christmas movie as well. Involved in this gang war are the vengeful mother of a murdered drug dealer, a group of dirty cops, a powerful politician played by Forest Whitaker, two fugitives who are being set up to take the fall, and Hardy's character, Walker, who has ties to just about every party in some way or another. Havoc is the kind of movie that finds different ways to bring these characters together in varying combinations so that they can shoot at each other. Gareth Evans feels like a kid who has his favorite toys in a sandbox and he's just smashing them together against each other. Now, that approach can either be exciting or it can be mind-numbing. What makes Gareth Evans a good action director, in my opinion, is that he's able to walk just up to that line, put a toe over it, and then pull back, even if only for a few minutes. Excessive would be a great word to describe this movie. One bullet never gets the job done when 15 will do, the blood squibs are plentiful, and viscera sprays everywhere when someone is shot, the clips in every gun are unlimited, the cards are practically bulletproof, and bullets hit the target with laser precision on the bad guys but manage to miss the good guys. If that's the kind of action movie that you find unbelievable or over the top, then this might not be the movie for you. It's all about tonal consistency. Some of the things that I just named would drive me crazy in an action movie that was trying to be a different kind of action movie. A movie like Die Hard, for example, is all about the vulnerability of its main character. John McClane is a hero that we like because he bleeds and he hurts and he doesn't always walk away unscathed. Havoc is largely built on the idea that Tom Hardy in this movie, and perhaps also in real life, is an unstoppable tank. And so I think that all of those things work for this movie because they fit into the kind of movie that Gareth Evans is trying to make. Now, there are some things that aren't so great. The script, for example, is not the movie's strongest point. It's not breaking any new ground on a story level. It falls into some tropes that you've seen before. But it also managed to surprise me a few times. There were some rules in action movie making that were broken here. Some characters that, in just about every other movie that you've seen, would probably make it out that don't make it out. So it's not like it is completely rote and completely devoid of surprises. And really, it's the sort of movie that just kind of cruises along at 40 miles per hour for the first half and then jams the accelerator, speeds up to 150 miles per hour for the second half, and doesn't stop until the end credits roll. Tom Hardy's great in his typical Tom Hardy role as a man of few words who's also able to show you that he has a heart underneath his gruff exterior. I think that Tom Hardy's actually a really good actor, even in these less verbal roles. I also liked Jessie Mae Lee as Hardy's partner, Ellie, who doesn't really know what she's getting into when she's assigned to his gruff homicide detective. And the movie bolsters its supporting cast with actors like Timothy Olyphant, Forest Whitaker, and Louise Guzman, who, quite frankly, makes every movie better. On the technical side, Evans reunites with many of the people he's been working with for his entire career, including director of photography, Matt Flannery, and his sound mixer slash composer, Arya Priyogi. They help to give his movies a consistent feel, and Flannery in particular has figured out how to make a camera kinetic and sometimes shaky without losing focus on the action. His work in a big fight that happens in a nightclub, in particular, is top-notch. There was one creative choice that I don't necessarily think worked for the movie, and that was on a lot of the exterior shots. Anytime you went outside and saw a cityscape or shots of traffic, it was very stylized, sort of like Robert Rodriguez's Sin City. And I don't think it worked in comparison with how gritty the rest of the film feels. I don't know if it was shot on actual film, but it looks like it was. It has that film-type lighting. It doesn't look like a streaming movie, and so when you go outside and everything is very slick and digital, I don't think that those two things marry together well. I'm not really sure what the motivation was behind doing this, other than the fact that it might be more practical and less expensive to do these shots through visual effects. But I just don't think it served the movie overall. There's a tendency in the film industry to treat fans of a particular genre as if they are a monolith. Action movies, like horror movies, attract all kinds of different fans, and just because you're a fan of one type of action film or horror film, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be a fan of another type of film in the same genre. But if you like excess and an action film that just goes hard, then I think that you'll like Havoc. It doesn't rise to the level of the raid films, but then again, few action movies do. I enjoyed it more than the more traditional action movie that hit theaters this weekend, The Accountant 2, and generally, I think that if you like Gareth Evans and if you know what you're getting into with this movie, then you'll enjoy it as well. So on my personal scale, I'm giving Havoc an it's good and certainly better than a lot of the movies that you see on Netflix right now. I liked it even more than Carry On last year, and that was a movie that I also enjoyed. But what do you think? Are you gonna be watching Havoc on Netflix? Let me know down in the comments below, and be sure to stay tuned right here. Tomorrow, I am doing a live stream that would be on Sunday to celebrate the five-year anniversary of this channel. Believe it or not, I'm planning to go live at 7 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, 4 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. I'll be hanging out, answering your questions. I've reached out to a few friends to see if they might wanna come on and hang out. And really, it's just gonna be a celebration of the channel as we continue to grow and evolve and try new things, and all the stuff we've been doing for these last five years, which have been a crazy five years in the entertainment industry. Thanks so much for watching this review. Until next time, stay safe, and I'll see you then.