REVIEW: Havoc (2025)

Movie Reviews

While the pedigree gave me and, I’m sure, many others, high hopes, Havoc is the usual Netflix movie – and really the usual streaming movie in general. It’s an uneven, overstuffed, empty-headed diversion that makes little use of its stellar cast and wastes some well-constructed action scenes (and some braindead ones) with chaotic camerawork that doesn’t let us enjoy the mayhem.

When a Triad bigwig is gunned down by a masked hit team after a drug deal, the seller, Charlie Beaumont (Justin Cornwell), is blamed by the gangster’s mother (Yeo Yann Yann), the head of the Triad, and marked for death. His father, mayor-elect Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker), sends Patrick Walker (Tom Hardy), a corrupt cop in his employ, to find Charlie before the Triads do. But a trio of dirty cops led by Vincent (Timothy Olyphant) is also searching for Charlie, and everyone is happy to leave a trail of bodies in their wake. As the title implies, havoc ensues.

Havoc is playing with a fairly rote setup, and that’s fine; plenty of great action movies are derivative – or at least reminiscent – of others. The key to making them work is to make the characters pop, to give the audience a cool, likable hero to root for, some sneering villains to root against, and a reason to care about the assassination target making it out alive. But Havoc doesn’t do this; it’s content to throw us into the fray and hope we have fun, never becoming more than its premise. Tom Hardy playing the lead is a good first step because he’s a terrific actor, but he doesn’t have much to do besides deliver some awful dialogue (and boy, Havoc has some bad lines, especially when it’s trying to be funny) and occasionally kill some people. There’s plenty of gold to mine from having him play a crooked cop who’s struggling with the ramifications of his actions, but that theme is discarded quickly. Saving Charlie could have been framed as his chance for redemption, but it’s never anything more than the latest order from his corrupt boss. (Why does the mayor-elect need bad cops working for him? Havoc never says.)

This lack of definition extends to most of the characters in Havoc. Timothy Olyphant infuses Vincent, a generic cop gone wrong, with every ounce of charisma and subdued menace he can muster, but it’s not enough to make him anything but a cardboard heavy. Jessie Mei Li plays Ellie, Patrick’s rookie partner/trainee, and she’s fine, but she’s mostly just there to do stuff, not to be a person. Mia, Charlie’s girlfriend played by Quelin Sepulveda, has more screen time than Charlie does, to the point where she probably should have been the bad guys’ target instead of Charlie; she’s okay, but again, mostly there to be imperiled and get rescued by Patrick… until she suddenly becomes a martial arts expert out of nowhere in one of the film’s wackier elements. The actors who get the juiciest moments are all supporting players with a handful of scenes among them, and they all happily rise to the occasion. Forest Whitaker begins in sleepwalker mode, but when he acts opposite Yeo Yann Yann as the Triad boss, the two of them come to life. She lost her son, and he’s about to lose his (unless Tom Hardy can save the day), and their reactions to this feel like those of real people. The other is Luis Guzmán as Raul, Mia’s uncle, who raised her and loves her like a father, and Guzmán is so good that he conveys a lifetime of fatherly love in three scenes. Basically, the parents are all great in their small roles, but everyone else is just a stock character in a low-tier action film.

The second way to make a seemingly run-of-the-mill movie like Havoc stand out is to give it some badass, memorable action scenes, and again, Havoc screws up the stew despite having the proper ingredients. When the gunplay and fistfights start, you can see some good action choreography in play from Gareth Evans, the guy who directed The Raid: Redemption and its sequel. Halfway through Havoc, the various opposing forces converge on a nightclub where Charlie and Mia are waiting, and there’s a big action sequence that looks great – or it would have if the camera would stay still for five seconds. Yep, we’re back to the shaky cam, the bane of my action-movie-fan existence that refuses to die the agonizing death it deserves. The same is true of the ridiculously bad opening car chase, which, like most of these nowadays, looks like a video game cut scene, and not a particularly good one. The same is true of the relentless finale, although this is better than the earlier action scenes; the shoddy camerawork is there, but it’s lessened a bit, so we get a better sense of the violence. What wrecks the finale is the sheer lunacy of it; I don’t want to give too much away (I figure I’m safe telling you that an action movie ends with an action scene), but it’s one of those situations where an overwhelming force suddenly forgets they’re all carrying machine guns so the plot can happen. Speaking of which, the bad guys in Havoc can’t hit the broad side of a barn, but to a comical degree; they make the Star Wars Stormtroopers look like Hawkeye.

But Havoc isn’t all bad, despite its decided lack of anything special. Amid the poorly filmed action sequences are some good bits of violence, and Tom Hardy gets a few fun kills, one or two of which are cut away from entirely too quickly. And the chaotic nature of the action does lead to some good sweeps of the camera that show just how elaborate these sequences are, with disparate characters fighting to the death in different sections of the night club, or the Triad army breaking into a remote cabin from various windows and doors. There’s also a very intense sequence in a hospital involving Ellie, a wounded cop, and a Yakuza member on an assassination mission; this is, without a doubt, Ellie’s best moment, and her battle with the killer humanizes her more than any of her dialogue. It’s nothing to go out of your way for, and there are way better movies with similar themes – I’d heartily recommend Ron Shelton’s Dark Blue, David Ayer’s Street Kings, and Richard Donner’s 16 Blocks for gritty action films about corrupt cops seeking redemption – but Havoc is okay if you want a serviceable guns-and-guts fix.

Let us know what you thought of Havoc in the comments!

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