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This movie has had some varying reviews. 

Empire magazine awarded it four stars comparing it positively to The Raid films, that saw the director Gareth Evans heralded as a brilliant new auteur of action cinema a decade and a half ago. 

The Guardian only gave it two though. Critic Peter Bradshaw felt that the drama ‘went down in a hail of its own bullets’. For him the gunplay and punch ups were a distraction that took us away from the story and characterisation. 

For my part, I didn’t even love The Raid and The Raid 2. This doesn’t appear to be a widely shared opinion but, while I agree that the action was impressive, I found them to both be a little repetitive, even tedious in places. With this one I’m landing somewhere in the middle. I agree that the fights are thrilling but the plotting that links them feels a little trite and unnecessarily convoluted. Almost contrary to Bradshaw, I found the action to be a welcome distraction from the plot. 

Havoc relies less on martial arts sequences than the Raid movies. There is an element of this here but the fights are a bit more scrappy. There is also more gunplay which borrows from and builds on the work done in this area with John Wick. There is also a notable car chase at the start that if I’m honest I’m a bit torn on. The camera stays close to the action as a truck and multiple police vehicles swerve amongst one another in a way that is reminiscent of the brilliant first person fight scenes in Jung Byung-gil’s The Villainess. However the over reliance on, admittedly impressive, CGI to achieve this effect also made me think of the snowball sequence in The Polar Express, which I don’t think is what they were going for. Generally though the action is exciting even if it is stitched together with cliched plotting. 

The performances are also committed. Tom Hardy’s grizzled tough guy act is becoming a schtick but I’ll allow it this one last time, and he is well supported by established character actors and talented newcomers alike. I also want to celebrate the fact that the whole of this searing US crime movie is shot in South Wales. A Welsh director working in Indonesia was always a bit odd, but having him make these kind of films on the streets of Cardiff and Swansea is frankly even odder, yet great. To be fair you wouldn’t know (CGI has been used a bit here too).

The release of Havoc was delayed by Covid and the strikes so it’s been a while coming. Unfortunately though I’m not sure it is going to stay long in the memory, not in mine and Peter Bradshaw’s anyway.