Havoc info:
Director: Gareth Evans
Writer: Gareth Evans
Starring: Tom Hardy, Jessie Mei Li, Timothy Olyphant, and Forest Whitaker
Hello and welcome back to another week here at 1guysmindlessmoviereviews.com. I am pleased to tell you that the weather has finally turned nice where I am. I can finally wear shorts without freezing, so that is a plus. Apart from that, softball season is in full “swing”, so wonderful weather mixed with evenings at the diamond have been really nice. At the same time, it does make it harder to sneak away to a movie, so this week I decided to relax at home and check out the new Netflix action flick “Havoc”.
“Havoc” is both directed and written by Gareth Evans and was released for streaming on April 25th. I want to jump right into this, but as usual, I need to get my spoiler warning out of the way. So, if you haven’t seen “Havoc” yet and don’t want the ending spoiled, then I would go back to my homepage here or check out some other reviews of some movies you may have seen here. For everyone else, let the action commence.
I watched this a few days ago and was ready to put my thoughts down instantly, but I’m glad I waited. Since I have seen it, I have read a little bit more about what Evans was thinking when he made it. I mean, right out of the gate, there is an intense, over-the-top car chase scene that almost looked as if it wasn’t completed properly before release. But we quickly learn that we are in store for this sort of thing all the way through.
Walker (played by Hardy) is a homicide detective in an unnamed, but modern-looking metropolis. He also appears to be a bit jaded, so he doesn’t treat his new partner Ellie (Mei Li) very nicely. But he also seems to be good at his job, but bad at being a father and a husband. He has been living away from his wife for about a year or more and doesn’t see his daughter much. There is definitely something inside of him that he needs to figure out.
There is no shortage of violence, fighting, and intense action all the way through “Havoc”; in fact, every single gunfight has more bullets sprayed around than just about any that I’ve seen since watching a John Wick movie. Even though it first appears that Walker is a bad cop, it turns out that he has done some bad things, but overall, he has a good conscience and has tried to do the right thing. That includes a flashback where he was the sole member of a group of police officers that wanted to save a man’s life before he was killed in cold blood by Vincent (Olyphant).
All of this leads up to Walker being caught in the middle of a war between Vincent and his fellow officers out to get him and the head of a criminal underworld trying to kill the son of the politician Lawrence Beaumont (Whitaker) for mistakenly thinking he killed one of theirs. Lawrence’s son Charlie (Justin Cornwell) and Mia (Quelin Sepulveda) are the lone survivors of this wrath and must work with Walker to escape alive.
There were a few holy shit moments for me while watching “Havoc”, none more so than when Mia starting fighting and is apparently and expert at every sort of fighting and shooting you can imagine. It caught me off guard, even though it sort of fit with the scheme of the whole movie. Like I said before, this was really over-the-top, and it was that way from start to finish.
Eventually, all parties meet up at Walker’s house for an epic showdown/gunfight that you need to see to believe. Bullets and bodies were everywhere, and it moved extremely fast from shot to shot. Most of the main characters get shot and killed, ending with a fleeing Vincent as Walker stumbles to stop him. The big question is, does Walker live after the credits begin to roll, or has he sustained too many injuries to go on?
So, like I mentioned before, I was ready to jump on here and give this a scathing review about how it was sloppy, un-edited, and moved too fast for the viewers to catch everything, but after reading some thoughts from Evans and what he was trying to accomplish, I feel a little different now. This is by no means a great movie, but I can say that I don’t think it’s a terrible movie anymore, either. If you watch this, go into it with an open mind, but also know you’re not going to see a masterpiece either. With all that behind me, I really can’t give this more than a 5 out of 10 still.
That’s it for me this week here at 1guysmindlessmoviereivews.com. Have you seen “Havoc” yet? What are your thoughts on it, and do you think it was over-the-top and crazy editing like I do, too? Let me know in the comments below, and I will be back next week with another mindless movie review of some sort.
