Havoc

After a drug deal gone wrong, a detective fights his way through the criminal underworld to rescue a politician's estranged son, and inadvertently unravels a deep web of corruption and conspiracy along the way.

Set in an unnamed US city sprinkled with bits of New York and Chicago and Los angeles, that is actually a soundstage in Wales, a gang of thieves steal a truck with a load of washing machines that contains a hidden shipment of cocaine. It was unclear to me whether they meant to steal the truck, the load of washing machines, the coke, or all three, but regardless, the heist has gone bad. The panicking thieves are being pursued by a blood-crazed gang of cowboy cops, a group of grizzled white guy narcotic detectives with stubble and brown hair who could all be brothers, but that's never confirmed one way or another. The thieves finally get away as one of the cops is badly wounded during the chase, and ends up hospitalized. 

This sends the cops into a psychotic rage, and the streets are immediately filled to the brim with apoplectic former D students looking to hurt anyone and everyone and get away with it.

Looking to pay off their debts, so that they can lay low from the rabid cops, the thieves take the stolen cocaine to the head of the local Triad. Unfortunately, a gang of masked assailants burst into the Triad’s hideout during the deal, gunning down everyone. The thieves barely escape.

Patrick Walker, a grizzled homicide detective and a terrible absentee parent, who is also a crooked cop on the payroll of Lawrence Beaumont–the local real estate tycoon, mayoral candidate, and underworld boss–gets called to the scene with his rookie partner, Officer Lady-whose-name-I-didn't-catch. There's blood and bodies everywhere, and the cops are willing to accept either gang beef, or maybe suicide, either way, they're ready to pack it up and go home. But even though he's a piece of shit, Walker is also an amazing detective who gets results, you stupid chief, and he immediately recognizes what actually happened there, so he begins hunting for the thieves. Also, it might be Christmas Eve.

Stopping in the hospital to visit the injured Narcotics Detective, we learn that Patrick used to work on that squad too, but now he doesn't, because reasons, and also, the squad is a bunch of jerks who now hate Patrick for reasons that probably have to do with why he doesn't work with them any more. And if you guessed that somebody in that group, maybe all of them, might be dirty, then you've obviously seen a cop movie before. That doesn't mean you're special or anything, so don't go getting too big for your britches, there, buddy, because the filmmakers have seen those same cop movies themselves, and they're gonna be pulling liberally from them for the rest of the film.

Meanwhile, “Mother” a senior Triad leader, arrives in the city and immediately starts fucking people up. She wants to know what happened to her son, the dead Triad guy, who was actually her son, not just her "son" because she makes every member of her Triad call her Mother. Her hunt culminates in a gang war kicking off between the triads and the mob, when she kidnaps Lawrence Beaumont from his motorcade, because it turns out that one of the thieves was Lawrence’s son, Charlie, and another one was Charlie's girlfriend, Mia. 

Patrick manages to track down Charlie and the thieves, but so do the Narcotic Detectives, who were also the masked gunmen who killed the Triad boss for the usual basic bad guy reasons. There’s a big shoot out. Patrick barely escapes with Mia and Charlie. So now Patrick, Charlie, and Mia are caught between the Triads, the Mob, and the cops, so basically they've got trouble (They've got trouble!), right here in Fake American City (Right here in Fake America City!), with a capital T that rhymes with B and that stands for boring (That stands for boring!)

After that, there’s a few more double-crosses, a couple of drawn-out fist fights, and some shoot outs with a lot of digital squibs, all of it ending with a big ol’ gunfight at a cabin that’s set either in a forest or maybe a swamp, it was hard to tell, either way the end set-piece is clearly a rip-off of both the ending of LA Confidential and also Heat. And in the end, nobody gets out clean…

Especially those of us who sat through this film.

This was a terrible film.

Just terrible. But where something like Heads of State was terrible because it was so obviously expensive and yet also so incredibly mediocre... Havoc is terrible because it was boring, and rote, and shockingly ugly to the point of distraction, just an absolute incoherent mess. That's maybe the worst trifecta ever.

I didn’t hate this film, but that's really only because it wasn't worth the effort. Havoc is so basic, so paint-by-numbers, so born from a pile of boring, worn-out cliches, with the absolute worst swooping around CGI "camera" work ever, that it was barely able to hold my attention. Story-wise, it's an otherwise unremarkable and unsurprising "penitent dirty cop trying to do one last good thing" snoozer of a story, one that normally I wouldn't have even bothered posting about it. What's the point? There's nothing of value here. But Havoc is such a remarkably ugly movie, that alone felt noteworthy.

I saw that the producers tried to say that they only used “digital enhancements” but the film looks like a knock-off Sin City to me, but minus the style, like it was filmed on a soundstage wrapped in a greenscreen, with only the barest semblance of a set, which is exactly what it is. I don't mind that kind of thing, it's not like it's all that uncommon these days, but I do mind when it's so obvious. I do mind when characters feel weightless as they float around mud-smeared digital backgrounds. I do mind that, because then it feels like the filmmakers are either inept, or they just don't give a fuck, and both those options suck. Whatever the truth is, whether it's all CGI or just "enhancements" (however that's defined), the simple fact is, Havoc is just too ugly to ignore.

That said, it is always nice to see Tom Hardy and Timothy Olyphant and Forest Whitaker and the always fantastic Luis Guzman show up in a film, even if they are just showing up to do their expected respective things for the paycheck. So there's that at least, but otherwise... Havoc is an ugly, boring, and unoriginal film.

Pass.