Metacritic reviews

Even in a genre that’s long indulged in excessiveness, this is the ruthless over-the-top carnage aficionados covet.

Rote as Evans’ plot might be, and wasteful as its treatment of certain characters definitely is . . . he has a well-developed ear for ice-cold gangster speak, and he isn’t afraid to make people pay a steep price for their penance. It’s enough to forgive him — and/or the movie gods — for making us wait so long to see him do it again.

Can 20 minutes or so of brutally inventive action really prop up a whole movie? In this case, yes. Havoc doesn’t reach the mayhem-as-characterization heights of John Wick or the Asian films that clearly inspire Evans, but it does turn its gnarly spectacle into a kind of absurd redemption for the flatness of its characters.

The movie leaps to life whenever the bullets start flying. It's the generic gangland stuff in between that's not up to snuff, even with Hardy lending his trusty gruffness to the haunted-cop boilerplate.

Because what Havoc lacks in characters and story, it delivers in two audacious waves of indiscriminate killing that are so bruising and relentless they make the “John Wick” movies look like “Sesame Street.”

While it's a shame the movie around the cast doesn't quite match their efforts, it at least gives them just enough to keep Havoc from being a complete waste.

By the time Havoc ended, I felt as exhausted as Hardy's beaten and bruised character. I suppose Evans and company deserve some credit for making an action movie that really leans into the brutality, but there's only so much of that you can put up with before it starts to grow tedious.

If the rest of it had been as driven by such a ferocious sense of purpose as its final act, Havoc would be one of the finest action movies of the decade so far.

Despite a top-tier cast and bone-rattling action to keep you engaged, the Netflix flick buckles under a cluttered story with chaotic execution. It’s watchable, even entertaining in bursts — but beneath all the bruises and broken bones, there’s not much else to hold onto.

Evans certainly brings the craziness and the violence but, for me, without the stylish martial arts of his Raid films and without any plausible sense that anything is believably at stake.