But by the time Havoc reaches its excessive conclusion, writer and director Gareth Evans has redefined the gritty cop genre, burying any pretenses to nobility under mountains of bullet casings and oceans of blood.
A Bad Cop in a Bad World
Havoc condenses a whole crime epic into a propulsive 105 minutes. Late in the holiday season in some undefined American city, a quartet of small-time hoods are chased down the highway by police. In desperation, two of the hoods throw their stolen merchandise at the cop car closest to them, hurling a dryer into the persuing vehicle. The appliance smashes through the cop car windshield, exploding not with just glass and plastic, but also mountains of cocaine.
Upon seeing the attack upon his fellow officer, lead cop Vincent (Timothy Olyphant) and his men trace the cocaine to its source, Chinatown gangster Tsui (Jeremy Ang Jones), and open fire. The hoods escape the melee, but when when Walker (Tom Hardy) arrives, he recognizes one of them as Charlie (Justin Cornwell), son of crooked and powerful politician Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker).
Beaumont offers Walker a deal. He can get Charlie out of the mess without it getting to the press, Walker will be out of Beaumont’s debt. Walker has to find Charlie before the others looking for him, including Tsui’s vengeful mother (Yeo Yann Yann), her duplicitous right hand man Ping (Sunny Pang), and Vincent and his gang of cops. Making things even harder is Walker’s idealistic younger partner Ellie (Jessie Mei Li), who doesn’t realize the depths of his darkness.
That plot gives Evans plenty of space to do what he does best, craft visceral fight scenes. Evans broke out with 2011’s genre-defining martial arts movie The Raid: Redemption, which brought Indonesian action to the West and paved the way for the John Wick franchise. Certainly, that type of hand-to-hand combat occurs in Havoc, especially in a glorious extended fight sequence that occurs halfway through the film. When Walker, Vincent, a silent Chinese assassin (Michelle Waterson) and their respective gangs descend on Charlie and his friends in a club, an eight-minute fight breaks out, starting with Chinatown gang members battering cops with batons and ending with a gunfight that spills out into the streets.
Evans adds to his repertoire new ways of depicting carnage, including the aforementioned movie car chase, shot with just the same immediacy as the combat scenes. But the most notable addition is the use of gun violence. Gun shots have rarely been louder in a movie, rivaling those in Alex Garland‘s Civil War and Warfare. People don’t get shot just once; they’re peppered with bullets, convulsing as they’re filled with lead. The blood appears to be digital, instead of the practical squibs of previous eras, but that allows Evans more space to show how bodies can be destroyed in various ways.
