Havoc

Havoc truly shines through its incredible action sequences-long, fast-paced scenes packed with blood and gunfire! Every action fan will definitely get their money's worth here.

However, the film fails on almost every other level. It has no real meaning or depth, which makes it hard to get invested. As a result, it also lacks real tension.

On top of that, the movie is filled with irrelevant characters and side plots, making it hard to follow at times.

Tom Hardy delivers a solid performance as always, but he's given almost nothing to work with here.

Unfortunately, this one is only recommended for hardcore action enthusiasts.

Do you like non-stop gunfire for two hours with no plot or interesting characters? Then you'll love Havoc!

The camera angles are strange, either shaking or swerving violently, or moving to unusual angles such as from underneath, for no apparent reason.

There's more gore than a horror film such as metal hooks ripping open flesh on a face, for absolutely no reason as it's a gunfight.

Every line in the movie has swearing. I don't care about contextual language but it was like they told the AI writer to include it just for the sake of it, even when it doesn't sound natural or make sense!

The nightclub scene was the only part worth watching due to the martial arts set to thumping music, but avoid the rest.

Ok, this action packed crime film is bloody, brutal, gritty, but the importance of bodycount makes you get rif off your head the rest of the story. No one cares about the intrigue which only a handful of us will follow. The action is really powerful, well made, but the camera work is also "too much", it may make you dizzy. The action scene in the night club is inspired from JOHN WICK, maybe more than the previous THE RAID films - directed by the same guy. And this scene is too long for me, I nearly felt bored. The ending is lousy. Yes, a forgettable film. Tom Hardy is just OK. Not more. I prefered THE RAID features; concerning GANGS OF LONDON, I have not watched yet - also made by Gareth Evans.

Shooting is cartoony, characters miss a whole lot but fire a lot of bullets with almost no precision, combat is visceral, satisfying and gory and in style of the director, very similar in the way it was shot to the legendary The Raid, camera follows the action closely but as the action itself is hectic so is the camera so a lot of the scenes move really fast and have quick cuts in between action pieces.

Story is predictable and you start to understand the whole narrative in the first 30 mins and characters are too one dimensional to even slightly care about them.

Tom Hardy gives a slightly better performance here than he did in Venom, his character is gruff, gritty and jaded and he manages to somewhat sell it, but he shines in his fight choreography which is simply put glorious and over the top.

Gun violence on the other hand seems too gratuitous, characters suffer multiple injuries yet somehow are still left standing and are able to one shot someone else. Precision is completely thrown out the window in some segments of the movie, in one scene a character is shot through a car window with a shotgun blast that barely scratches him and in the next a character riding a train is shot down multiples times from a big distance with a pistol.

The entirety of the traffic in the movie is for some reason almost completely computer generated, cars move unrealistically and really look out of place, ruining the immersion and making the whole viewing experience seem really cheap. Pistols sound epic but not in a realistic way as every pistol fired sounds like a cannon being shot and a lot of pistols in the movie seem to have rapid fire capabilities in one scene then suddenly becoming single shot in the next. Submachine guns firing sounds like miniguns.

You really have to suspend your disbelief when watching this movie as it's so hilariously unrealistic.

I was waiting for this movie to be released for as long as it has been announced, and now that the wait is finally over - it's definitely disappointing.

Clearly something must have happened to the original execution of this movie. It was quietly delayed for years and was released on streaming just as quietly. It's certainly no "Raid", it's more like a tired Jason Statham type movie. Some of the things in it are plain bizzare, such as the setting. This feels like Gotham or some alternative version of RoboCop's Detroit. The CGI is awful, it's so weird it us even present here in such copious amounts considering what the director is known for. The story is simple, yet indescribably odd. The lighting is also a weak point of this movie. The casting is superb and some of the fights are fine, but again, coming from Gareth Evans it's a bare minimum of what you'd expect. This isn't a terrible movie by any stretch and you can enjoy it for what it turned out to be, but you have to keep your expectations surprisingly low.

The highlight of the movie is probably the club fight with Gesaffelstein blasting, but that's as good as it gets. Overall, pretty passable.