Havoc

A title like “Havoc” sounds a little off-the-middling-thriller rack, but really, it’s an apt description of Gareth Evan’s long-gestating (it appeared on this blog’s THRILLERS ONLY movie preview for 2023) shoot-em-up released directly to Netflix. We are dropped almost straight away into a wild car chase that goes from side streets to the freeway, culminating with a laundry machine full of cocaine hurled out the back of a truck and through a cop car’s window that functions as a triple exclamation point. It’s like Round One of Hagler v Hearns. Of course, that fight was so intense so fast that Hearns could not help but run out of gas, and so does “Havoc,” not least because narratively it hangs its hat on a complex, nay, convoluted web of conspiracy involving New York police, politicians, and the criminal underworld that goes a lot of places but also goes nowhere. Ostensibly, it’s all tied together by Patrick Walker, a bad detective trying to go straight, and played by Tom Hardy which is ironic because Tom Hardy is the kind of actor that likes to transform and there just is not much to transform into; he seems to just sort of bring along his accent from “The Bikeriders.” Set on Christmas Eve, we are introduced to his character buying a few presents for his daughter, and the cashier mercilessly mocking him may as well be the movie mercilessly mocking its own cliche as just that. No, everything that happens in “Havoc” is just an excuse for Evans to stage violent action scenes, and if that’s your jam, then giddy up. Bodies become cinematic biological experiments in how many different ways blood can spurt and ooze and the machine gun fire lights up the screen like so many weaponized yule logs for the winter solstice.