“Havoc,” the new action film from writer/director Gareth Evans, has been on /Film’s most anticipated movies of the year list for about four years. When we first learned Tom Hardy would be teaming up with the filmmaker behind “The Raid” for a movie about a journey into a corrupt underworld, we were thrilled. But thanks to Covid, the strikes, and some good old fashioned scheduling issues, it’s taken much longer than we expected to actually see the movie. The film is finally on Netflix as of today, and while your mileage may vary on how it turned out as a whole (you can read /Film’s full review of “Havoc” here), action junkies will almost certainly be enthralled by several of the movie’s incredible setpieces — despite the bullet count not always exactly matching up with what you see on screen.
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I recently caught up with Evans to talk to him about designing those setpieces, including the climactic confrontation that takes place at Walker (Tom Hardy)’s fishing shack. As you might expect from a high-octane action thriller, shots begin flying fast and furious as characters converge on the location, and the whole place and several villains are absolutely shredded by the time the final blast rings out.
“What was really fun about that sequence was the design aspect, because along with Jude Poyer, my stunt coordinator, we scrutinize every sequence, and we scrutinize every little beat of it,” Evans told me. “Not just in terms of camera and edit points and the action itself, but also where things come from. So we knew that we were paying homage to John Woo and Ringo Lam and Johnny To with this film, but when it came to the gunplay in that fishing shack, we knew that we were going to slightly exaggerate how many bullets could be fit within the mag.”
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Gareth Evans knows you’re going to be nitpicking the gunplay in Havoc
The homages to Hong Kong cinema are crystal clear in the way “Havoc” characters fire their weapons: If one shot is fired, it’s a good bet that dozens are going to follow, until a clip is fully unloaded and the body on the other end is rendered a bloody, pulpy mess. It’s an over-the-top approach where the excessive nature of the gunplay is the point; it’s not realistic, per se, but if you’ve seen movies like “Hard Boiled” or “The Killer,” you’ve seen this kind of thing before.
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Evans is fully aware that there’s no stopping the sticklers who are going to push up their glasses and “well, actually” these shootouts as they point out the amount of ammunition fired from these guns far exceeds what would be possible in the real world. But even though he and his team fudged the numbers a little on that front, there’s a method to their madness that viewers can track if they so choose. As Evans explained:
“Every time the characters would empty a gun, they would throw it away and recycle and grab somebody else’s. So what that meant was we had to figure out and orchestrate which triad members would fall through windows and come into rooms and what guns they would have with them, so that we could logically track the weapons usage across the room. So that was something that I really wanted to [be specific about], because I know that there’ll be people complaining about, ‘Oh, it’s so unrealistic. They shoot guns all over the place!’ But really, if you check the weapons that they pick up, they are using them. They are recycling weapons throughout that space there.”
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You can hear my full interview with the writer/director on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast:
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“Havoc” is streaming on Netflix now.
