HAVOC

Name: HAVOC
Item: HAVOC
Author: Review

"Bad Cop Bloodbath"

Family Content: -3 Excessive sex, violence, immorality, and/or worldview problems. (Sometimes excessive content such as violence is in otherwise redemptive movies.)

Entertainment Quality:

	None	Light	Moderate	Heavy
Language
Violence
Sex
Nudity

Credits →

What You Need To Know:

HAVOC, the latest ultra-action movie by RAID director Gareth Evans, now streaming on Netflix, follows a familiar formula. Walker is a cop whose moral compromises in doing elicit jobs for a corrupt city official put him in a difficult position regarding all his relationships. He jumps at it when he discovers that his under-the-table employer needs a last favor that could free Walker from his grasp. It will take him a miracle and over a hundred body bags to succeed in this last mission. However, if he does, he might not just be free of a corrupt official. He might discover that the HAVOC that has marked his life of late is not all his doing.

The movie's worldview is humanistic, focusing on the morally compromised actions of a corrupt cop. Forced by his past misdeeds to honor a favor, he embarks on a bloody quest to save a life. It's hard to find much sympathy for any of the characters here. Most of the "good guys," mostly cops, admit they've done dirty work for an incredibly corrupt politician. However, there is one strong element of redemptive storytelling: two compromised characters, one of whom is the protagonist, perform self-sacrificial acts and partially redeem themselves. Still, the story and characters are essentially a series of shades of gray in which good and evil are difficult to distinguish, and a steady spray of blood-red violence clouds everything. Movieguide® advises media-wise families to skip this one.

Content:

(Ro, H, B, LLL, VVV, A, MM):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

The movie’s worldviews are Romanticism and Humanistic with gray introspection on the morally compromised actions of a corrupt cop. Forced by his past misdeeds to honor a favor, he embarks on a bloody quest to save a life. It’s hard to find much sympathy for any of the characters here. Most of the “good guys”, mostly cops, admit that they’ve done dirty work for an incredibly corrupt politician. However, there is one strong element of redemptive storytelling where two compromised characters, one the protagonist, perform self-sacrificial acts and partially redeem themselves;

Foul Language:

100+ f words, 14 obscenities, 2 strong profanities;

Violence:

An opening shot of men covering up a crime shows a man choking to death in his blood on the ground and a man throwing a weighted barrel into the water; a car chase leaves bodies in its wake and villains toss a washing machine onto a police car in pursuit killing the driver in gruesome, bloody realism; a drug purchase gone bad shows bags and piles of cocaine in a room with many bloody bodies riddled with machine gun fire; this scene is replayed in slow motion with blood flying from mouths, eyes, and other body parts; constant and relentless violence in nearly every scene of the movie shows bloody and disturbing deaths by guns, bats, steel pipes, knives, hand-to-hand combat, throats are cut with razors, etc. etc. etc. Two extended fight scenes showcase semi-outrageous levels of violence. In the first, many people fight in a night club with night sticks, steel pipes, and knives with many bloody casualties; one “highlight” is a person cut many down with a massive cleaver (blood flies everywhere). This is followed by a finale in which the protagonist and two others are trapped in a cabin under fire from a multitude of assailants. This final fight goes on for over 30 minutes with over a hundred potential fatalities and gratuitously gruesome deaths like people shot so many times they look like blood fountains and one character finished off hanging freakishly from a harpoon dart line;

Sex:

No sex;

Nudity:

No nudity;

Alcohol Use:

Some drunkenness in night clubs;

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

None, and,

More Detail:

The well-known saying, “Chinese make great action scenes; Americans make great movies,” applies here. Though Evans is Welsh, not Chinese, his action sequences are stellar and exhilarating. Having brought the Indonesian martial art form of pencak silat blazingly to life in movies like THE RAID and its sequel, he now brings a similar ultra-violent flare to HAVOC. However, the heart of the movie itself, its story and characters, really the things that make a story worth delving into or not, are lackluster at best.

From its off-putting opening to its blood-soaked final fatalities, this dark tale lacks the power of RAID because its characters are all so compromised. There is no “good cop.” When everyone but a couple of minor characters are gray or fading to black, the picture becomes distorted. By the end of HAVOC, the viewer has become desensitized in a way that is disturbing in and of itself.

The movie’s worldview is humanistic, focusing on the morally compromised actions of a corrupt cop. Forced by his past misdeeds to honor a favor, he embarks on a bloody quest to save a life. It’s hard to find much sympathy for any of the characters here. Most of the “good guys,” mostly cops, admit they’ve done dirty work for an incredibly corrupt politician.

However, there is one strong element of redemptive storytelling: two compromised characters, one of whom is the protagonist, perform self-sacrificial acts and partially redeem themselves. Still, the story and characters are essentially a series of shades of gray in which good and evil are difficult to distinguish, and a steady spray of blood-red violence clouds everything. Movieguide® advises media-wise families to skip this one.

Watch PLAYING WITH FIRE →

Quality:

- Content: +1

Watch THE WEDDING PLAN →