Don't Roll a One

If Max Payne was shaken as a baby, you’d end up with the Gareth Evans movie Havoc.

I really wanted to like the film. I liked the cast, I liked the grimy vibe, and “The director of The Raid” is an unimpeachable action pedigree. The trailer looked I’d be watching a solid ultraviolent action romp. What I got felt like the uncanny valley version of a 90s blood opera.

You Owe Sifu $20

Credit where credit is due: around the halfway mark, all the characters who hate each other end up in the same place and there is a wonderful fight that reminded me very much of the Club level in the game Sifu. Gareth Evans plays to his strengths here: lots of martial arts and weapon choreography, painful hits sold well by stuntpeople, and guns used as punctuation. It’s a multi-sided battle that really does live up to the movie’s title.

I’m Bringing Shaky Back

OH NO HE DID A SHAKY CAM.

All the gunplay in Havoc is accompanied by shaky cam, that post-Bourne plague on action cinema we all thought was gone with the rise of the John Wicks. On its own, it’s not great, but the camera work is combined with the other cardinal sin of movie shooutouts: Bad CGI muzzle flashes. Well-done CGI muzzle flashes and firearm effects aren’t egregious. I’m a blanks-and-squibs kid but I get it, they restrict certain types of close-range choreography.

The end result is you’ve got this painted-on swath of sparks, geysers of debris and blood, fountains of shell casings, and muzzle flashes. It’s pure chaos already and then you shake the camera like JJ Abrams. Pick one or the other.

John Woo was an action director who mastered the art of firearm chaos and he did it by slowing everything down. He held the camera steady and let the onscreen whirlwind provide the visceral thrills. Evans tries to take the same camera tricks that make you feel like you’re in the middle of a brawl and apply them to gunplay and it’s all too much.

My guess is the camerawork is there to obscure some mid CGI, which he continues with a lot of the car shots in the film.

Need For Speed Cutscene

Impossible camera movements. Improbably agile semi trucks. Weightless police cars. That’s right, it’s a CGI car chase.

Look, car chases are expensive and dangerous, I get it. But the end result is, well, what the heading says. It’s a video game cutscene.

Everything Else

I’ll just run down my list of grievances real quick:

• Wasted Timothy Olyphant and Forest Whitaker
• 45-50 minutes of meandering exposition
• Unlikeable characters (not you Raul you’re cool)
• Set at Christmas to no real effect
• Unearned melodrama

The end result is that Havoc comes off as a blood-soaked cartoon that overwhelms your senses but leaves you underwhelmed.