Schlub Shot: Havoc (2025)
Havoc, Zines, and Minis!
It’s bizarre when a good director makes a bad movie. There is always the residue of a good movie on the screen, lingering like radiation around its edges—interesting ideas, dynamic character choices, set pieces that are almost there. Gareth Evans changed action cinema with 2011’s The Raid: Redemption. Simply put, there would be no John Wick without his apartment-crawling Indonesian bloodbath. Yet, since then, he’s struggled to recapture that spark. The Raid 2 (2014) is solid (if overlong and slightly more cartoonish), and Apostle (2018) quietly disappeared into the murk of Netflix sludge. Beyond those two features, he’s been hard at work on the BBC series Gangs of London, which, to paraphrase Chris Ryan of The Watch podcast, depicts violence in a way that “cannot be legal.”
Evan’s first film in seven years, Havoc is a messy return to the medium. Sometimes hyper-stylized, sometimes flat as concrete, this neo-noir stars Tom Hardy as a dirty cop trying to save a politician’s son from the Chinese Triad in a convoluted case of mistaken identity. Havoc begins with promise—a cartoonish car chase that bulldozes through city blocks, homeless encampments, and busy highways. Each cop car (made of rubbery rain-spackled CGI) goes 300 miles per hour, with the abandon of Grand Theft Auto IV police. At one point, a cop hilariously shouts “slow down!” at their target before dousing them with a spray from his Uzi. However, the film’s early promise dies as the gonzo action gives way to Evan’s criminally bland script. Walker (Hardy), a disgraced cop, spends the opening minutes buying Christmas gifts for his estranged kids at a bodega and arguing with his wife about custody. Hardy is no stranger to schlock, but this performance is real bottom-of-the-barrel, “eyyy I’m runnin’ from the regrets of my past ‘ere” type shit. With the bland character scaffolding he’s given to work with, and without the tweaker-weirdness he brings to the Venom trilogy, any second that Hardy isn’t punching a hole through a man is a flagrant waste of viewers’ time.
You can always count on the fight scenes in a Gareth Evans movie to be worth checking out, but Havoc’s fights are sparser than Evans’ usual fare—relegated to two major setpieces broken up by minor skirmishes and dreadful exposition. The first fight scene is the reason I decided to even write this article. I was ready to stamp this flick with my dreaded “dogshit” Letterboxd label, until, at the midway point of Havoc, Tom Hardy saunters into a nightclub with the aesthetics of a neon-lit parking garage. He arrives to kidnap/rescue Charlie and Mia (Justin Cornwell and Quelin Sepulveda), a young couple whose defining traits are that they are in this movie. At the same time, the Chinese Triad and a gang of corrupt cops (led by the always great Timothy Olyphant) arrive to kill the young lovers. Set to a pounding medley of Gesaffelstein bangers, the shootout rips. Evans serves the audience a beautiful steak dinner filled with creative gunplay and the pulse of industrial electronica…only to surprise us with dessert when Luis Guzmán busts into the club doing Gun Kata. It’s a hilarious bit of stunt casting—one that totally eclipses the other notable American actor cast in Havoc, Forest Whitaker, who is doing everything he can not to look into the camera and ask, “Can we make this a cash payment instead?”
Like the aforementioned GTA IV, Havoc is set in a fake city—one that might as well be named “Crime Town.” Dirty snow and trash float on the wind, billowing over the mounds of drug addicts and lowlifes that infest the streets. Yet, like everything in Havoc, this is only taken to a half measure. If the city is going to be bargain-bin CGI anyway, why not go bonkers and create something gothic like Gotham from the Burton films or stylistically bold like Sin City? Don’t just make this a dingier version of NYC or Chicago, but some new, insane hellscape that automatically guides the tone in the right direction. That lack of tonal consistency might just be the bullet in the head that kills this project. Evans’ BBC series, Gangs of London, isn’t perfect, but it is one of the most humorless spectacles of carnage I’ve ever seen. That void-black attitude gives the series an identity beyond the routine blood baths. Scatterbrained between melodramatic redemption and piss-poor attempts at humor, Havoc might be trying to ape too much from John Wick, a series that Evans himself helped inspire. The final action set piece leans way too hard on the melodrama, desperately trying to give Tom Hardy something to fight for. Most conversations throughout the film are characters telling him “I know what you did,” or him grumbling back “you have no idea what I’ve done.” The emphasis is gravely disproportionate to the actual issue—years ago, Hardy and Olyphant’s crew of cops accidentally killed an undercover cop. Sure, in real life, that’d be a big no-no, but in a movie where Hardy cuts five hundred Triad henchmen into fajita meat…maybe get over it?
Zine Update
The Zine is here!
I’ll be posting a launch page with the shop link next week, but for now, enjoy the sneak preview! A CHUNKY fifty-two pages of essays, art, interviews, and more—all hand written to maintain that schlubby texture.
Issue #1 will be available for sale Tuesday, May 13th, along with some other items I’m really excited about. This was a true labor of love, so I can’t wait for y’all to get your hands on this.
Miniature Update
Next weekend I’ll be traveling deep into the woods of New England for Under The Dice Fest and the New England Mordheim Open! I got into kitbashing miniatures (taking bits and pieces from various sources to create a unique model) last year, and I’m beyond excited to check out my first fest for the hobby. I’ve harped on the importance of tactility quite a bit in my essays, and the DIY/punk attitude of this community is absolutely in concert with the schlubbiness I love.
I’ll be participating in the Mordheim tournament on Saturday—a cult favorite wargame where two groups of 8-12 miniatures fight over scraps within a ruined medieval city. Discontinued in the early 2000s, it’s become a prime example of the creativity and wicked talent within the scene. I’m still learning the rules (pray for me), but I’m pleased to introduce my first-ever finished warband: The Astrologers of Kislev.
I’m also hoping to play a round or two of Flames of Orion—a mech game created by one of the festival organizers. It just launched on Kickstarter, so check it out! This is my Kappa Aquatic Harvester Team (KAHT), heavily inspired by the brilliant world-building series Kappa: the World of Turtles (which you should also check out).
Havoc is available to stream on Netflix.
Special thanks to Emma Kraus and Max Seifert.