Havoc

I'm a big Tom Hardy fan, a so it gives me no pleasure whatsoever, to say that "Havoc", a film he stars in, isn't good, at all. Its not Hardy's fault, nor for that matter, is it the fault of the cast, in general. This thing fails because it crudely glues together, almost every tired cop film cliche you can think of and hope's it amounts to something. The result, as you might expect, is aimless, tedious, shallow and for me at least, unwatchable. I managed about half of this hoary affair, before calling it quits. In short, no amount of decent acting can survive a dismal script. A truly marginal watch, at best.

Best film I've seen in 2025. Unrelenting chaos, gore, ultra-violence. Not what I look for in a movie usually but just the right feel for our time. Plot development: unload a magazine of rounds, and then another. The writers and director keep the finger on the trigger. If you have a sense of humour you will make it. The cgi/ai overlays which usually put me off give the scenes a fluffiness with a gamer feel. Much of the camera work is like in-game play. A raw, textured, grim cyberpunk style and low bass sounds evoke a club music video style until the action kicks off. I could say Tom Hardy's intensity drives the story but the whole thing is intense, every action and character is caught in the raw. Jessie Mei Li's well-played character Ellie is the one who stands morally uncompromised in the mayhem, the innocent through whose unflinching eyes we observe with horror the unfolding crazy. My favourite scene is the night club gun fight starting with the rolling train and the low beats gathering into a breaking storm of tightly choreographed fight vignettes. Lots of great fight scenes, gun sounds and action flows. Havoc is the war of all-against-all playing out on the streets as our liberal democracies slide into a state of nature. Any attempt to make good by Hardy's character is engulfed by the force of events. Unfiltered. 2025 needs this movie.