By the time Havoc limps to its joyless, bullet-infused conclusion, it becomes clear that something curious; if not outright tragic; has happened to Gareth Evans. Once revered as one of the most kinetic action filmmakers of his generation, Evans now seems adrift in the genre he helped revitalize. Havoc, his fifth feature and his second with Netflix, feels less like a film than a misguided obligation; one of those streaming-era curios that exist more to fulfill contractual quotas than to entertain, provoke, or even merely impress.
This is the director, after all, who gave us The Raid and The Raid 2, symphonies of bone-cracking choreography and blood-soaked geometry. Those films were defined not only by their visceral set pieces, but by a certain militant discipline; a belief that action could be as elegant as it was brutal, if treated with the right reverence. Evans choreographed chaos like a maestro with a broken baton. But Havoc is a different beast. Or rather, a paper mâché animal dressed in CGI camouflage, lurching across the screen with neither ferocity nor form.
The plot, such as it is, clings to the bones of a tired cop drama. Tom Hardy, in what may be his most disengaged performance to date, plays Walker, a crooked detective with an opaque past and a contractually obligated moral compass. He’s tasked with rescuing the son of a powerful mayor (Forest Whitaker, gamely trying to breathe life into his scenes) after a botched drug deal leads to a pile of corpses and a citywide manhunt. There’s talk of Triads, corrupt police, political cover-ups; all the usual seasoning in a stew that never quite boils.
But here’s the real shock: Evans, the high priest of punch, seems to have forsaken the very altar he once worshipped at. The first set piece; a car chase through a rain-slicked city; ought to announce the film with confidence. Instead, it unspools like a pre-vis rendering of a Fast & Furious video game from 30 years ago. Gone are the bruising stunts and grueling physicality of Evans’ earlier work. In their place: digitally animated collisions, plastic lighting, and a weightless sense of spectacle that feels wholly alien to his sensibilities.
The film’s first actual fight arrives at the 55-minute mark; an almost surreal delay for a director whose legacy was built on the raw immediacy of combat. When it does, it’s not a fight at all but a dimly lit nightclub shootout, a discount riff on John Wick but with none of that franchise’s balletic precision or mythic cool angles. Bullets fly, bodies fall, and nothing registers. It’s chaos without consequence; no rhythm, no stakes, no style. Just gunfire as wallpaper.
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There are betrayals, of course. One loses count by the third act. Everyone seems to double-cross everyone else, but it all lands with the emotional heft of a late-season twist on NCIS. The finale finds Hardy’s Walker holed up in a lakehouse, where all the antagonists; gang members, corrupt cops, political heavyweights; converge for what promises to be a bloody showdown. Instead, we get more uninspired gunplay, more anonymous grunts dispatched with unceremonious shrugs.
Even Hardy, usually a magnetic screen presence, seems shackled by the material. His dialogue is sparse, and when he does speak, it’s in a kind of mumbling growl that suggests he’d rather be anywhere else. It’s tempting to joke that he might as well have worn a mask again, but the problem isn’t just concealment; it’s commitment. This is a role that demands menace, vulnerability, or at least a flicker of desperation. We get none of it.
The supporting cast fares no better. Timothy Olyphant appears and vanishes with such swiftness that his character might as well be a hallucination. Only Whitaker seems to be having fun, chewing scenery with the kind of practiced charm that makes one wish Havoc had leaned into camp. At least then it might’ve earned its absurdity.
And therein lies the central tragedy of Havoc. It is a film that takes itself too seriously to be fun, yet is too clumsily made to be taken seriously. Evans, once the patron saint of practical stuntwork and kinetic storytelling, has delivered a film that feels almost hostile to the idea of craft. Where The Raid was meticulous, Havoc is lazy. Where Apostle was eerie and inventive, Havoc is derivative and disjointed.
It’s tempting to speculate about the circumstances; studio meddling, creative burnout, the tyranny of the Netflix algorithm; but the final product speaks for itself. Havoc is a husk of a movie, an action film made without action, a thriller devoid of thrills. It leaves the viewer not exhilarated or outraged but simply confused: What happened to Gareth Evans? And will he ever come back?
If this is the future of action cinema on streaming platforms, it’s a grim one; digitally enhanced, narratively impoverished, and aesthetically numb. Havoc is not just a misfire; it’s a betrayal. Not of the audience, necessarily, but of a filmmaker’s once-astonishing potential.
