General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20265 min read

Havoc (2025 film)

Havoc is a 2025 action thriller film written and directed by Gareth Evans and starring Tom Hardy as Walker, a bruised detective who fights his way through a criminal underworld to rescue a politician's estranged son after a drug deal goes wrong, uncovering a web of corruption that ensnares his entire city.¹ It was released on Netflix on April 25, 2025.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	Netflix, April 25, 2025¹
Director / writer	Gareth Evans (The Raid, The Raid 2, Gangs of London)¹
Lead cast	Tom Hardy (Walker), Jessie Mei Li, Justin Cornwell, Luis Guzmán, Yeo Yann Yann, Timothy Olyphant, Forest Whitaker¹
Production	Severn Screen, One More One, XYZ Films; shot entirely in Wales²^•³
Filming timeline	Wrapped October 2021; reshoots in summer 2024 after delays including the 2023 Hollywood strikes⁴
Runtime / rating	1 hour 45 minutes; rated R⁵^•⁶
Reception	64% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (110 reviews), 34% audience score; Metascore 57 on Metacritic⁵^•⁷
Viewership	Peak week of 29.8 million views (April 21–27, 2025); 112.4 million views in Netflix's 2025 engagement report⁶^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot and characters

Walker (Tom Hardy) is a detective coerced into doing dirty work for corrupt politician Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker). When Beaumont's son Charlie (Justin Cornwell) becomes wanted for involvement in drug running and the apparent slaying of a young figure in the Chinese gangs, Walker must rescue him from both the police and a vengeful triad, aided by rookie officer Ellie (Jessie Mei Li) and opposed by the corrupt officer Vincent (Timothy Olyphant).⁹ The gang boss pursuing Charlie is played by Yeo Yann Yann, a character identified by her Triad status as "big sister" and officially credited as Tsui's mother.¹⁰

The film is set in an unnamed American city, described by reviewers as having a Gotham-like quality, though it was shot in Cardiff, Wales.¹¹^•⁹

Production and delays

A four-year gap. Evans finished principal filming in October 2021. The first edit suggested about a week of additional photography to clarify story threads, but assembling the ensemble cast in the same place proved difficult, and the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes halted work for seven or eight months. The reshoots finally took place in the summer of 2024, nearly two years after the edit was delivered.⁴ Evans said the long post-production let the team experiment with the cut so that the additional photography was focused only on what was needed.⁴

Welsh production. The film was shot at Great Point Studios in Cardiff, Dragon Studios in Bridgend, and on location across South Wales, and Netflix reported it as the biggest feature film ever shot entirely in Wales. It was produced with Creative Wales support, and Netflix made it available with Welsh-language subtitles.³ It was financed in part through the Ffilm Cymru Wales Feature Film Production Fund via the National Lottery and Creative Wales.¹²

Style and influences

Evans described the film as a love letter to the Hong Kong heroic bloodshed genre of the 1980s and 1990s, citing John Woo, Johnnie To, and Ringo Lam as influences; heroic bloodshed films typically feature police officers and criminals as two sides of the same coin.¹³^•¹⁴ Unlike the martial-arts-driven Raid films, Havoc relies mainly on gunplay, with action design and choreography by Evans's regular collaborator Jude Poyer, who worked on the choreography and pre-visualization before the film was cast.¹⁵^•¹⁶

Two sequences drew particular attention: an opening car chase and a sustained nightclub fight, which Evans called a sequence of a scale he had never taken on before.¹⁴^•¹⁷

Reception

Critical response was mixed, with praise concentrated on the action. The Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus calls it "an anemic crime saga punctuated with bravura action sequences," and the site recorded a 64% Tomatometer from 110 reviews against a 34% audience score.⁵ Metacritic assigned a Metascore of 57 based on 24 critic reviews, classifying the reception as mixed or average.⁷ Reviewers repeatedly singled out the action choreography, especially the nightclub sequence, as the film's strongest asset, while criticizing an overloaded plot juggling many factions and betrayals.² Some reviews were more favorable: The Daily Beast scored it 85, calling it the chaotic action extravaganza of the year, while RogerEbert.com scored it 38, finding the screenplay formulaic.⁷

Viewership. Havoc reached number two among films streaming worldwide on Netflix in early May 2025, behind the German-language thriller Exterritorial.¹⁸ Its peak week drew 29.8 million views (April 21–27, 2025), it spent 42 days in the Netflix Top 10, and Netflix's 2025 engagement report recorded 112.4 million views, ranking it among the year's most-watched English-language Netflix films.⁶^•⁸^•¹⁹

References

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 20, 2026; Sep 30, 2026; Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Sep 20, 2026; Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026