If you polled action movie junkies on the most enduringly influential films of the last two decades, it’s doubtful anyone would go long without mentioning Gareth Evans’ The Raid. That Indonesian production, beyond introducing actors/martial artists Iko Uwais and Joe Taslim to a wider audience, cemented Evans’ status as one of the best directors out there of frenetic, brutally unsparing fight scenes–as did the even bolder, wilder sequel The Raid 2 in 2014. Netflix’s Havoc is in some respects an attempt to tap into that unchained, frenzied abandon displayed by Evans as a filmmaker in his Indonesian era, and a step back in some other respects for the director toward pure, pulpy entertainment after the more heady and filmic folk horror fare of 2018’s Dan Stevens-starring Apostle. Havoc doesn’t lack for recognizable faces for the American market, not with Tom Hardy, Timothy Olyphant and Forest Whitaker front and center. But it’s also not really interested in giving those performers real roles to chew on. Rather, Havoc is primarily a canvas for Evans to paint in bullet holes and viscera, delivering wave after wave of hilariously over-the-top, comic overkill, at least in its back half. It may very well be the bloodiest Netflix original film ever made.
This becomes clear when, roughly 90 seconds into Havoc, we already have a man spitting blood in his death throes, as Hardy’s thoroughly disgruntled police detective Walker (no time for last names in Havoc) intones some portentous lines about the way his upholder of the law has clearly fallen from grace in the last few years following a deadly botched drug deal. He’s separated from his family, characters so perfunctory that they never actually share the screen with him at any point. He’s surrounded by other, scheming detectives (led by Olyphant) who are treated as both brothers in arms, and as constant threats to exceed his own level of corruption, even though the dirty Walker is working directly for the city’s corrupt mayor (Whitaker). He’s hunted by Chinese gangsters, themselves trying to avenge their dead family members killed in an early gang massacre in pursuit of … washing machines filled with stolen cocaine? Sure, why not.
Oh, and it’s also Christmastime. This impacts the story in absolutely no way, except for the fact that there’s a scene (yet another massacre) set to “O Holy Night.” If there’s one thing here that feels like a Netflix directive, this random bit of “irreverent” gloss is it.
All you actually need to know? Walker is a bad guy, surrounded by worse guys in a city full of the worst guys (and gals), but he wants to go straight. And in order to do so, he’ll need to find the mayor’s estranged hoodlum son, on the run with his own incompetent crew of punk kids after another botched job. Believe it or not, this makes for a first half of Havoc that actually holds Hardy at some distance from the action, feeling more like gritty underworld noir as he interrogates people and draws nearer to his target. This might even create a perception for a short while that Gareth Evans was trying to craft a more nuanced crime story in an almost Guy Ritchian mold … but then the doors are blown fully off in the film’s back half as it descends into extravagant bullet-fueled mayhem.
Suffice to say, this is where Havoc pays its bill, and then some. When the first of the truly gangbusters combat scenes finally arrives, the film floors the accelerator and never lets up again. The action hits with all of the gory, thudding intensity you expect from Evans; stunts that are brutally impactful and creative camera movement that flicks from character to character in the midst of a brawl, leaving us in a breathless daze. Many of these fights are made that much more chaotic in feel by the fact that there are at times four or five distinct factions in play at the same time, each of whom has different objectives or alliances. A massive nightclub brawl illustrates this, becoming a huge comedy of errors punctuated by automatic weapons fire and tumbling bodies. At times, Havoc does strain comprehensibility as a result–juggling so many characters in a single sequence, with chaotic shaky-cam cinematography that echoes some of the first half of Dev Patel’s Monkey Man, it threatens to become overwhelming in clearly communicating what is happening to whom in any given moment. Perhaps the frenetic visual language has been used, at moments, to smooth over some rough edges–Tom Hardy is a seasoned stunt performer, but it’s safe to say he’s no Joe Taslim. As the film rolls on, however, the pure chaos becomes something you find yourself accepting and surrendering to–the haphazard bullet spraying is like a torrential flood, and you release yourself and simply see where it will carry you.
This is the right frame of mind to truly gel with Havoc, an apt title if there ever was one. Subsequent shootouts push the limits of staging, blood spray and comic ultraviolence like an action corollary to an Evil Dead film, as unhinged as anything Sam Raimi ever envisioned. Not on his bloodiest day did John Woo ever get nearly this ridiculous. There are so many people flying through the air and blowing to pieces, it’s like we’re watching human skeet shooting. The vehicular stunts are just as nutty–from the initial “cold” (more like burning hot) open, the sheer sense of velocity and acceleration is hair-raising. Every sequence involving driving feels dangerous beyond belief, a panic attack on wheels.
With that said, the violence inherent to Havoc has been accentuated and exaggerated to such a degree, and is so often delivered via blazing gunfire, that it ends up reading as more darkly comedic than it does disturbing or truly grisly, despite all the gore. Contrasted with the up-close-and-personal, hardscrabble combat of The Raid, this doesn’t have the same immediacy and intimacy to the fighting–the relative distance provided by the gunplay makes it somewhat easier to instead chuckle at the over-the-top carnage. It’s more of a monument to bad taste and glorious excess, stocked by an endlessly replenishing well of seemingly suicidal mooks who rush into rooms eager to have their faces blown off. I can’t stress this enough: A person doesn’t just get shot and die, in Havoc. They get riddled with a hundred hollow points and torn to bits as blobs of viscera splatter everywhere around them, and then they die. Subtle difference, I know.
For a little over an hour and a half, that’s more than enough to sustain a wild ride, even when the framework is so threadbare. The film doesn’t even boast a traditional “big bad” to be overcome–it’s just an arena for the collision between its many factions, split between motivations that range from greed, to love, to self-preservation or psychotic vengeance. The famous faces writhe and die like all the others, lending whatever tiny amount of credibility they can to a project that barely cares they’re around–not when there’s more gunplay to be had. Wildly stylized and squelchy beyond belief, your enjoyment of Havoc really should be something you can predict before ever seeing a moment of it. And if you’re ready to be inundated with a sticky tidal wave of blood, then it’s hard to imagine you could be disappointed by the results.
Director: Gareth Evans Writer: Gareth Evans Stars: Tom Hardy, Jessie Mei Li, Timothy Olyphant, Forest Whitaker, Luis Guzmán Release date: April 25, 2025 (Netflix)
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.
