Havoc, which debuted a few weeks ago on Netflix and is still in its Top-10 most-viewed films list, couldn’t be better titled.

A few seconds into the movie, we are thrust mercilessly in the midst of a heist gone wrong. Driving hard and fast through a mix of live-action and CGI — one can understand why the film is called Havoc in these brief few minutes — Charlie, Mia, Johnny and Wes (Justin Cornwell, Quelin Sepulveda, Xelia Mendes-Jones, Jim Caesar), the four youngsters escaping with the loot, fling a washing machine on to the police car running bumper-to-bumper behind them.

The impact is deadly; the machine smashes through the windshield, critically injuring a young cop, and surprisingly — or rather, unsurprisingly — dispersing a snowflake-like white cloud of powder in the air.

This cocaine loot turns the night into a no-holds-barred fight for survival.

The body count is atrocious, between the police (one of them being Timothy Olyphant — no points for guessing that they knew that the washing machines had drugs in them), the youngsters, and the Triad (the Chinese mafia). Patrick Walker (Tom Hardy), a dirty cop estranged from his family and on the payroll of a corrupt mayoral candidate Laurence Beaumount (Forest Whitaker) is forced into the mess to save Beaumount’s son, who is one of the young looters.

This one night tale of hardcore action is written and directed by Gareth Evans. For some it might be a retread of his earlier hit, the Indonesian action-fest The Raid and its sequel. However, I disagree.

Havoc is as close to action-vengeance cinema made by director John Woo and producer/director Tsui Hark as it gets

Evan’s film is taut and balanced; it gives just as much space to its meagre story as it does to its characters. For a film clocking in at an hour-and-40-minutes, some things — like the connection between Walker and his cop-partner Ellie (Jessie Mei Li, who played Shadow and Bone’s protagonist Alina Starkov), or the appeal of and sympathy for the young looters — are left underdeveloped and underserved.

Hardy, his character often left grunting and trying to figure a way out of his inescapable predicament, holds the film like super-glue with Evans. The action sequences — the reason for the film’s birth, I gather — are kinetic and chaotic; though not chaotic in a can’t-see-or-follow-anything-on-screen way. One understands that time and space are closing in on the characters, and that constraint leads to utter ‘havoc’.

There is one aspect of the film that old-school action enthusiasts would immediately recognise: the homage to old Hong Kong action films such as the Chow-Yun Fat-starrers Hard Boiled and A Better Tomorrow, directed by John Woo.

Havoc is as close to action-vengeance cinema made by Woo and producer/director Tsui Hark as one can get. In fact, the reference — or a coincidence— hit this writer when a character named Tsui, the local Triad head, is killed off early in the film. The Triad, the unrelenting use of freely available ammo, bloody bodies, characters in unfavourable circumstances, a one-night event — the similarities are too much to ignore, and compels one to revisit its far better compatriots from the past.

That’s not to say that Havoc is a slouch. The film is perhaps one of the better-looking productions from Netflix that could have been a worthwhile cinema release.

Streaming on Netflix, Havoc is rated suitable for ages 18 and over. It has no nudity or sex — just merciless barrages of bullets and brutal hacks, slashes and impalements with cleaver knives

Published in Dawn, ICON, May 25th, 2025