In the Flesh: Havoc

Havoc isn’t great. The digital photography is often murky, the color palette is bland and played out, there’s nothing noteworthy happening on the acting front aside from a fun performance by Tom Hardy doing his signature mush-mouthed delivery, and the script is never better than fine. Even where it shines, in its action sequences, it often hews a little overstuffed, as in the dance club brawl between Triad gangsters and various factions of dirty cops. Director Gareth Evans’ overuse of whip pans makes it feel less like a chaotic, savage explosion of violence than like the viewer is a ball with which the characters are playing hot potato. The sense of momentum bleeds away with every swing and reversal until the whole thing feels like a gimmick. There’s good stuff on offer, sure. Wild angles, brutal takedowns, trademark Evans fight choreography, heavy on the blood and broken bones. You could certainly do worse!

Then we hit the shootout in an abandoned cabin in the woods, and the film transforms from some mild fun into L. A. Confidential by way of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the cabin literally disintegrating around the combatants in a hail of gunfire as Walker (Hardy) fights to keep Charlie (Justin Cornwell) and Mia (Quelin Sepulveda) safe from a Triad death squad. It’s chaotic, squalid, ultraviolence at its best. Walker kills three men with a meat hook, assault weapons chew through human bodies, shredding ankles, ventilating rib cages. Edwards’ tight, stop-on-a-dime camerawork really comes through in the claustrophobic setting, pulling double duty to put us in the shoes of people we don’t know all that well. Would it be better if the characters mattered to us? Sure, but even without that scaffold, it’s an action sequence to remember, a delicious collision between extreme action and horror sensibilities. 

Is it worth sitting through half-baked plotlines like Walker’s pitiful attempt to connect with his estranged daughter, or corrupt mayoral candidate Lawrence Beaumont’s (Forest Whitaker) concern over his son’s implication in a deadly gang shooting? Sort of. There’s a lot of that kind of thing going on here, and you could snip out twenty or thirty minutes of it without losing anything you’d miss. Edwards may have a few nice shots of city streets (Wales doubling for an ambiguous snowbound American city), but most of the rest is dollar store Nicolas Winding Refn ripoffs and cheesy dialogue. The moment Beaumont sacrifices himself for his son is so overwrought it feels like something out of a made for TV melodrama from the 90s. It’s no The Raid, but Timothy Olyphant makes a good heavy and there’s a lot of stylish carnage to admire.