Forest Whitaker

Havoc

27/04/25

Netflix

Welsh filmmaker Gareth Evans first came to prominence with his martial arts epic The Raid in 2011. An inevitable sequel (imaginatively entitled The Raid 2) followed in 2014, but his last big-screen release, The Apostle (2018), came and went with barely a ripple. So Havoc is clearly an important project for Evans. Which may explain why it feels like the very definition of the word ‘overkill.’

To be fair, it starts well. The action takes place in an unspecified American city – actually a heavily-CGI’d Cardiff. Grizzled cop Walker (Tom Hardy) is at an all-night garage, hastily trying to buy a Christmas gift for the twelve-year-old daughter he rarely ever sees. (Mind you, we don’t get to see much of her either.) Walker, it quickly becomes clear, is a dodgy copper, but then he’s not alone. Every member of the police force we meet in this story is on the take, apart from Ellie (Jessie Mai Li), who has only recently taken up her post as Walker’s sidekick.

After a drug deal goes wrong, Charlie (Justin Cornwell), the son of crusading politician, Lawrence Beaumont (an underused Forest Whitaker), finds himself hunted by a vengeful Chinese gang leader, who lost her own son in the resulting gunfire. Walker is ‘persuaded’ by Beaumont – yes, he’s also dodgy – to rescue Charlie, in exchange for a pardon for former crimes…

But the plot hardly matters, since Havoc – as the name might imply – is mostly an excuse to string together a series of action set-pieces. The first of them, the aforementioned ‘drug deal gone wrong’, is nicely staged, with some artfully-filmed slo-mo sequences and, what’s more, it’s relatively brief. But having dipped his bread in the old red stuff, Evans (who also wrote the screenplay) seems determined to serve up an ‘all-you-can-eat’ buffet of mayhem and murder.

The action becomes increasingly incoherent. People don’t just get shot and fall down, they dance around the screen spouting blood like human colanders. There’s a seemingly inexhaustible supply of ammunition and the Chinese drug gang employs an infinite number of human targets, all of whom appear to exist simply to run gleefully towards their own destruction. You’d need an abacus to keep a record of the body count.

For me, the main problem here is that, aside from Ellie, every character I meet is a villain of the lowest order and, while it’s not impossible to get audiences to root for bad people, you first have to know something about them in order to care what happens. But I know hardly anything about anybody and that includes Walker. Somewhere in this mess, excellent actors like Timothy Olyphant and Richard Harrington struggle to make any impression, as they are inextricably lost in a tidal wave of blood and bullets. As Havoc thunders towards its final, protracted punch-up, I’m already wistfully looking forward to the credits.

This one is clearly made for diehard action freaks and doubtless it will scare up some kind of an audience on Netflix – but for me it’s too loud, too messy and too downright unbelievable.

2.8 stars

Philip Caveney

Arrival

11/11/16

We’re all familiar with the scenario, right? Gigantic spaceships hover over the major cities of the world, and eventually disgorge battalions of vicious alien creatures, that are hell bent on world domination. Luckily, a group of plucky resistance fighters come together to kick alien butt and free the planet from tyranny…

Thankfully, Arrival really isn’t one of those films. Director Denis Villeneuve (Sicario, Prisoners)  chooses instead to depict an alien visitation as a positive, perhaps even fruitful occurrence. This is a sedate, almost hallucinatory film, that dares to try something different with a much mistreated genre.

Linguist, Dr Louise Banks (Amy Adams) finds her everyday life rudely interrupted by the unannounced arrival of twelve huge black ellipses hovering inexplicably in the air above different locations around the world. The ellipses (surely inspired by the paintings of Magritte) are silent and make no apparent attempts tocommunicate with the human race. Louise soon finds herself enlisted by Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) who is leading a team of North American scientists, whose job it is to try and make contact with the aliens and work out what (if anything) they are trying to tell us. Louise finds some common ground with scientist, Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) and the two of them set about the complex task of communicating with the inhabitants of one of the giant elipses. They are quickly dubbed heptopods and are giant octopus-like creatures, which (perhaps wisely) are only glimpsed through the haze that constantly surrounds them. As she starts to make progress, Louise is increasingly affected by images of her young daughter who comes to a tragic end…

I thought Arrival was a remarkable film, quietly persuasive in its approach and totally absorbing. The googly ball that it throws at its audience in its final stretch, hit me for six – I really didn’t see it coming – and it was only as the shock of the impact spread through me, that I began to appreciate just how skilfully the storyline’s tangled web has been put together. If the film’s ultimate message could be accused of being a little bit cheesy, it’s nonetheless a welcome relief from the usual crass Hollywood approach to alien visitations.

Worth further investigation.

4.2 stars

Philip Caveney

 

Southpaw

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06/08/15

Jake Gyllenhaal is always an interesting actor and, in Southpaw, he’s pulled off yet another transformation, piling on the muscle and jettisoning his good looks to play light heavyweight boxer Billy Hope; indeed, it’s hard to believe this is the same actor who gave us the creepy, emaciated ambulance-chaser he portrayed so brilliantly in Nightcrawler. We first meet Billy as he grimly holds on to his title belt in a bruising, bloody confrontation with a much younger fighter. The boxing sequences don’t really compare with the mesmerising, almost dreamlike sequences in Scorcese’s Raging Bull, but they’re nonetheless realistic enough to make the more sensitive viewers wince. But fate is waiting in the wings for Billy. When his wife, Maureen (Rachel McAdams) is accidentally shot dead in a fracas at a charity event, Billy finds himself on a slippery slope downhill as, in quick succession, he loses his licence to fight, his home is repossessed and his daughter, Leila (a winning performance from Oona Lawrence) is taken by child protective services. This is all harrowing stuff and director Antoine Fuqua mines it expertly for maximum distress; at several points I find myself tearing up. Can Billy ever find redemption and rebuild his career? Hey, is the Pope a Catholic?

It has to be said that from this bleak first third, the film enters a very familiar trajectory as Billy teams up with washed-up-boxer- turned-trainer, Tick Wills (Forest Whitaker), who quietly guides his protégée back to the top of his game. (Anyone who’s seen Rocky, will know the form. In that film, Burgess Meredith did pretty much the same with Rocky Balboa.) Whitaker manages the role with his customary skill and there’s a surprisingly decent turn from 50 Cents as a mercenary boxing promoter (who ironically declared his own ‘strategic’ bankruptcy recently – is this where he got the idea?).

Maybe Billy’s fall from grace is a little over the top – could anybody as successful as Hope fall quite so fast and quite so hard? And maybe his path back to championship fitness in just six weeks is a little too easy, encapsulated as it is in a perfunctory training montage. But nevertheless, the final confrontation is compelling enough to keep you on the edge of your seat till the final count.

All in all, this is decent entertainment with a distinctly gloomy edge.

3.8 stars

Philip Caveney