Havoc review: A gritty, brutal thriller
Review Overview
Action
8Plot
3Cast
8David Farnor | On 04, May 2025
Director: Gareth Evans
Cast: Tom Hardy, Forest Whitaker, Timothy Olyphant, Jessie Mei Li, Justin Cornwell
Certificate: 18
It’s been 14 years since Gareth Evans demonstrated to the world that you could kill a man with a filing cabinet. 2011’s The Raid was a mind-blowing, blain-splattering burst of mayhem, redefining the potential extremes to which action movies could go – and Evans’ Havoc continues that tradition, with added star power from Tom Hardy.
The film follows Walker (Hardy), a good-hearted but dirty-handed cop who has long been under the thumb of politician Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker). As Lawrence prepares to run for mayor, his son, Charlie (Justin Cornwell), gets caught up in a drug deal gone wrong – and Walker ends up having to track him down, caught between kidnapping cartel members and bent police officers.
By his side is young cop Ellie (Jessie Mei Li) and lurking in the shadows opposite is the cruel, corrupt Vincent (Timothy Olyphant, clearly enjoying himself in villain mode). And so the stage is set for a collision between all these players – and, with Evans at the helm, collisions can only result in violence.
The result is something that hews a bit closer to the stripped-down simplicity of The Raid, but still gets distracted by The Raid 2’s temptation to be more complicated than it needs to be – the characters here are surface-level at best, with even Walker’s subplot involving an estranged kid feeling more cliched than heart-grabbing. The always-charismatic Hardy elevates what’s on the page with grit and heft to keep us rooting for his beaten-up washout, but Havoc forgets that people are tuning for the mayhem of the title, not narrative twists.
The action, nonetheless, is reliably messy in its choreographed gunfire – bodies stack up and bullets fly with an intensity that hits with a satisfying gruelling punch. It’s a shame that it pauses so often between set pieces, but Havoc’s hard-hitting brutality build up its own unrelenting sense of momentum.
