16/05/2025

FRIDAY | MAY 16, 2025

25

LYFE

Havoc unleashes contrived mess

o Gareth Evan’s latest film falls short of previous action flicks

Hardy puts his Brazilian jiu-jitsu and athleticism to good use in Havoc ’s sparse action sequences. – PICS FROM NETFLIX

MOVIE REVIEW

A FTER a long hiatus following 2018’s folk horror film Apostle , Gareth Evans returns to the world of crime and action with Havoc , a film that truly lives up to its name, for better or worse. Evans, more popularly known for the cult favourite Indonesian martial arts duology The Raid and The Raid: Berandal from a decade ago, has shown that he is still at the top of the game when it comes to directing action flicks. However, his skill in taking on drama and writing have inexplicably fallen off hard. A contrived mess, Havoc concerns a group of thieves led by Charlie Beaumont (Justin Cornwell) stealing washing machines before grievously injuring a narcotics detective following a lengthy vehicle pursuit. In Evans’ escalatingly convoluted story, Charlie’s group tries to sell the drugs inside the washing machines to Tsui, the son of a powerful triad leader. This too goes awry, as a second group of antagonists with assault rifles and hockey masks show up, leading to Tsui and countless others dying. Dirty homicide detective Patrick Walker (Tom Hardy) is then tasked by the mayoral candidate of Havoc ’s unnamed American city, Lawrence (Forest Whitaker), to find Charlie – his estranged son – before the police and triad get to him. No Raid revival in sight Though Evans seems to have put The Raid franchise to bed, most of the writer-director’s fans are still expecting some sort of follow-up to his Indonesian films, which many in movie circles agree started the modern renaissance for martial Ű BY MARK MATHEN VICTOR

0 Director: Gareth Evans 0 Cast: Tom Hardy, Jessie Mei Li, Timothy Olyphant, Forest Whitaker

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Evans’ signature style of action filmmaking is simply not worth it. To make matters worse, they are not very long and are spaced far apart, while the best of the two occurs in the third act, taking place in a cabin as Hardy is put through a gauntlet of nameless goons that end with roughly 50 people beaten, knifed, slashed, harpooned and shot to death. It is a great sequence – a final hurrah true to Evans’ style that only slightly makes up for the rest of Havoc ’s story involving generic dirty cops, witless robbers and personality-free crime families. Havoc is streaming on Netflix.

arts and action films – after 2011’s The Raid , countless action films such as John Wick began to sprout up sharing the same DNA as Evans’ films. For anyone expecting Evans’ latest to be a spiritual follow-up to The Raid , you can rest easy because Havoc is not that film. That is not to say the film is terrible, but it is as decent as a Netflix film can reasonably get. It even feels wrong to put Havoc in the same sentence as The Raid , due to the film’s meagre amount of action sequences. Having to stomach the bulk of the film just to savour the two or so slivers of

Bront Palarae wins Thai award for supporting role

MALAYSIAN actor Bront Palarae made the nation proud by winning Best Supporting Actor at the 21st Baan Nang Klang Lakorn Awards in Thailand. He earned the award for his role as Heem in the horror film The Cursed Land , triumphing over five other nominees in the category. In a statement on Instagram, the 47-year-old described the win as an extraordinary and deeply meaningful experience. “Acting in a Thai

the film to life. In the same post, he shared his hope that cinemas in the Land of White Elephants would feature more stories about the Malay community, particularly from the southern regions. The Baan Nang Klang Lakorn Awards is a prestigious annual event that honours excellence in television and streaming platform productions across Thailand. – Bernama

film felt like a distant dream. And now, this recognition is beyond crazy,” he said.

Bront wins Best Supporting Actor at the Baan Nang Klang Lakorn Awards. – PIC FROM INSTAGRAM @BRONT_PALARAE

Bront, whose real

name

is

Nasrul

Suhaimin

Saifuddin,

said

it

was

also

an unforgettable experience for him to share the screen with talented actors such as Ananda Mathew

Everingham, Jennis, the late Sida Puapimon, as well as Han Zalini and Firdaus Karim. Bront also expressed his gratitude to the production team for their dedication and hard work in bringing

The film’s crime families are less interesting compared to how Evans wrote them in The Raid films.