Havoc (2025)

Bent policeman Walker (Tom Hardy) is in more than one kind of trouble. Domestically, he’s not only divorced but a horrible father, the kind of dad who somehow manages to forget that old obscure tradition of buying one’s spawn decent presents for Christmas.

He’s also involved in decidedly shady business with a group of colleagues lead by a character played by Timothy Olyphant (still one of Tolkien’s finest) that may or may not have involved some amount of cop killing in the near past. Furthermore, because he’s flexible in all kinds of bad directions, Walker is also beholden to real estate mogul and mayoral candidate Beaumont (Forest Whitaker), who has some sort of hold over him beyond just Walker being on the take.

The consequences of all of these different corruptions will come crashing down on what goes for our protagonist here when Beaumont’s son Wes (Jim Caesar) and Wes’s girlfriend Mia (Quelin Sepulveda) are at the wrong place at the wrong time and become witnesses and suspects in the rather spectacular murder of a triad boss. Soon, the triads – the killed boss’s mom is a real piece of work -, the other corrupt cops, and the real cops are after the couple. Beaumont only wants his son to live, and if that means involving Walker, that’s going to happen. Apart from an ever-growing amount of violence, there will be betrayal and confused loyalties, as one should expect.

Gareth Evans, as much as I love his first three films, is a much better action director than is he one of complex narratives, so Havoc’s first forty or fifty minutes are somewhat heavy going, with a dozen or so characters whose relationships – and even names – are often much more confusingly presented than is necessary. It’s not that their relations or the budding plot are lacking interest, but the pacing of the introductory scenes feels off and the storytelling lacks in clarity without a need for it to do so.

Once the various groups of assholes and morally bankrupt shitbags begin murdering each other – at more than one point in three or for way fights – Evans finds ample opportunity to demonstrate his brilliance at staging action scenes that are frenetic, chaotic, spectacularly, sometime poetically, violent, and absolutely controlled. While he’s putting a heavy emphasis on fast cuts and jittery camera work, Evans doesn’t use these stylistic elements to obfuscate weaknesses in the stunt work – as a matter of fact, all the havoc (sorry) and chaos on display is also clear and wonderfully easy to parse. This is just a guy directing the hell out of these scenes because the stuntpeople aren’t the only ones allowed to have fun.

The film’s visual style goes for a version of the neo noir – the city is clothed in the colours of darkness and neon, beset by digital grain for neither rain nor snow are going to touch this particular Christmas – and everyone living in it seems to have taken on the moral qualities this suggests. This America, not unlike the real one, is dominated by two things – money and violence – and any kind of innocence or genuine human feeling is bound to get a character killed nastily rather sooner than later. Even redemption, of a kind, is found only under a mound of dead bodies.

There’s no place like America today, as the poet said.

Three Films Make A Post: World War III Begins on Your Toy Shelf

Venom (2018): Well-liked at least by the better nerd critics and surprisingly successful, I’m the odd man out who just loathed this thing by Ruben Fleischer. But then, I had no time for the director’s Zombieland either and feel that the two films share the same problems: scripts that never develop any kind of dramatic pull; a lead character who is a whiny self-centred little shit (Tom Hardy of course doing his whiny little shit with an accent) who never learns anything from his mistakes; jokes that never hit for me and supposedly dramatic scenes that make me snigger sarcastically. Add to Venom’s problems Riz Ahmed’s generically boring and unfunny villain and action scenes that are in the lower third of contemporary superhero spectacle, and you really find my puzzled about what I’m supposed to like here? Okay, the film does have more to do for its non-powered female lead than typical and has the good taste to cast Michelle Williams, but that’s all I found to enjoy here. It’s still better than Deadpool, mind you.

Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween (2018): And the bad mood cinema continues with Sony’s attempt to make the first movie again, but cheaper and worse. So the script is a worse budget version of the first one with less interesting ideas, fewer fun set pieces, and no clever bits at all; Jack Black’s worse; the rest of the cast is so unmemorable, they make the decent one of the first movie look brilliant by comparison; the moral is more treacly; the PG horror more PG and less horrific; and Ari Sandel’s direction shows about as much personality as (please imagine me looking around my apartment for the thing in it with the least personality) a door knob.

Apostle (2018): Compared to the other two films in this entry, Gareth Evans’s worst film, a Netflix production about a man (Dan Stevens) with a laudanum habit going undercover on a cult-owned island to rescue his kidnapped sister and encountering worse things than just cultists, is sheer brilliance. Well, actually, it isn’t, really, but at least it is a film with certain ambitions that more often than not demonstrates actual interest in the art of filmmaking. The acting is generally strong (with Stevens, who is often relegated to clear-cut guys with little personality but can do quite a bit more when he’s allowed to, a fine stand-out), the script provides an interestingly skewed tale of guilt, redemption and responsibility, the cult and what it does turns out to be rather made for the lover of Weird Fiction, and Evans creates a fine mood of dread and paranoia. The film’s big problem is its sluggish pace, with too many scenes reiterating things the audience has already understood, slowing things to a crawl for no good reason on more than one occasion.


It’s still a worthwhile film, mind you, but shave at least twenty minutes of its 130 minute running time, and you might have a great one.

Past Misdeeds: Merantau (2009)

aka Merantau Warrior

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


This write-up is based on the shorter international version of the film. There seems to be a nearly twenty minutes longer "director's cut", but what wonders it may contain I know not.
Country boy Yuda (Iko Uwais) is going on his Merantau, which, if I understand the film correctly and it's not lying, is a kind of journey into the outside world all young men of his area have to fulfil to be accepted as proper grown-ups. Yuda plans to got to Jakarta and teach the martial art silat there.

But having arrived arrived in the big city the not exactly world-wise young man soon finds himself penniless and without a roof over his head. The handful of contacts that should have provided him with a helping hand or two are all gone and unreachable, and so - this is after all a quest for him - Yuda decides to rough it and hope for the best.

Instead of teaching martial arts, Yuda falls foul of the unpleasant gangster Johni (Alex Abbad) when he decides to protect dancer Astri (Sisca Jessica) from his bullying ways - and that just after Astri's brother Adit (Yusuf Aulia) has stolen his wallet. At first, Astri isn't too happy with Yuda's kind of help, seeing as it closes up the only source of income she and her brother have.

That's just the beginning of Astri's bad day, though, for Johni isn't just your normal shady type, but in fact selling off some of his dancers to the insane couple of white slave traders Ratger (Mads Koudal) and Luc (Laurent Buson), and of course Astri is supposed to become part of the "merchandise". Fortunately, Yuda is again at the right place to save the girl from trouble, even if it means first getting beat up by Johni's henchmen to then start in with a furious comeback. Unfortunately, Ratger does not approve of getting hurt in the ensuing fight and begins to pursue Astri and Yuda with a passion, violence, and hordes of mooks.

By now, we all know about the horrible films that can result when venerable Asian directors are exported to the west. Merantau is something of a bright mirror image of that sickening trend, and shows the great things that can happen when a young Welsh director goes to Indonesia to make a martial arts film. Even better, the positive buzz coming from everyone who counts (so not Roger Ebert, who couldn't even be bothered to get the film's not exactly complicated plot right, it seems) for director Gareth Evans's next Indonesian movie The Raid: Redemption (again starring Iko Uwais) suggests the success of Merantau to be far more than a happy accident.

Unlike what one might fear, Merantau isn't the slightest bit touristy. Evans neither wallows in pretty postcard pictures (unless when it makes sense) nor in the look into the gutter aesthetic (again, unless when it makes sense). The director doesn't present his characters as "exotic" Indonesians, instead showing them as people whose culture might be different from the one the director grew up in, yet who are individuals and not symbols for an interpretation of that culture.

At its core Merantau is telling a very traditional martial arts movie story about a country guy going to the big city and doing good there with the powers of his pure heart and his martial arts skills, but there are a few elements that deviate from the usual formula, if mostly in small ways. There is, for one, Evans's complete avoidance of the horrible "country bumpkin in the city" humour that all too often doesn't let a film's hero look naive and a bit simple as it's probably supposed to, but instead makes a viewer doubt his intellectual abilities completely; there's a difference between being too stupid to live and lacking experience in city life the writers of that type of humour never seem to comprehend.

Evans's film shows other positive deviations too, but those are of a kind I found a bit too surprising to want to spoil now, so I'll just say that I did not expect two central plot points of the film to become quite as dark as they do in the end. It's also very praiseworthy how the film's actual dark moments surprise, yet still feel like organic parts of the movies and not like Evans shouting "look how grim and gritty this is".

Merantau also differs from many (though by far not all) martial arts movies by putting actual effort into the non-action scenes, going out of its way to leave room for quiet moments that not so much provide depth to the characters as they provide them with humanity. That does of course make the action all the more impressive because the audience cares more about the characters in those scenes. We're not talking "naturalistic psychology" here, of course, but I don't think that sort of thing could actually work in the context of a martial arts movie. Especially not in one that has the scenery-chewing Mads Koudal (and the less exalted Laurent Buson whose characters share the sort of male friendship with sado-masochistic undertones John Woo would approve of) as its big bad; including quiet moments does after all not mean a film has to eschew the larger than life when that's more interesting.

Once it gets going - Evans clearly believes in a careful build-up - the film's action (and here you thought I'd never actually talk about it) is quite fantastic, looking to my eyes like a mix of the brutal type of stunt work found in Thai cinema of the first decade of the century and more traditionally elegant fights. "Elegant", even in the truly brutal later fights, is also a fine way to describe the film's approach to fight choreography, as well as Iko Uwais performance. Even when blood is (mildly) spattering and bones are broken, Uwais seems so poised the old, and true, connection between martial arts cinema and ballet comes to mind again, especially after the film has brought the connection up directly early on in the proceedings.


As for weaknesses, from time to time it becomes visible that Evans must have worked on something of a shoe-string budget that didn't allow the fights to take place in surroundings as impressive as their choreography would deserve, so the action occurs in the rather traditional bars, back streets and around a bunch of cargo containers, but at least it's not a series of warehouses (or rather, one warehouse standing in for a series of warehouses). Truth be told, for most of the time, it's too riveting watching Uwais to care about the background too much anyhow.

Three Films Make A Post: KARLOFF TURNS KILLER IN A HORROR-CRAMMED THRILLER!

V/H/S/2 (2013): I was less than enthusiastic about the first part of this horror anthology but the second beats the first one easily and with style, forgoing the attempts to look as fugly as possible for more reasonable POV techniques, and doing much better work telling its very simple genre stories. Then there's the film's absolute highlight, Gareth Evans's (of The Raid fame) and Timo Tjahjanto's (of The Mo Brothers fame) segment "Safe Haven", which goes from mildly creepy, to heavily creepy, to insane what-the-fuckery during the course of half an hour or so, and left me actually slightly breathless. Saying it alone is worth the price of admission is putting it mildly.

Ambushed aka Hard Rush (2013): One thing to keep in mind when making a movie in a genre as rich as the gangster film is that you really need to bring something original or something of your own to the table when making one, because there will already be dozens of movies in existence who did the standards better than you did. Giorgio Serafini's Ambushed really doesn't, and instead tries its luck at squeezing as many worn out tropes into the movie as possible, without achieving any other effect than that of disjointedness and an inability to focus on any one theme or character. Instead, the film is a series of barely explored clichés that is made even less consistent by being the kind of Anchor Bay production that has to feature larger than a cameo but smaller than a substantial role parts for Dolph Lundgren, professional racist Vinnie Jones, and Randy Coutoure (another in a long line of acting ex-wrestlers who can't act for shit), instead of casting actors actually fit for their roles and available for enough shooting days to actually be effective as parts of a movie.

Needless to say, Ambushed is not a movie that stays in mind.

Kiss the Abyss (2010): I'm often rather down on "indie horror" as a genre but Ken Winkler's film avoids most of the pitfalls of what has become a style. So the narrative is rather concentrated without needless digressions, the acting - particularly by leads Nicole Moore and Scott Wilson - solid, and the film is clearly made with an idea of what can be achieved under the circumstances of its production and what can't. The story - boy loses girl to death, boy and rich father go to sorcerer for help, girl returns but develops socially unacceptable habits - isn't exactly original but told with conviction and an eye for the Weird, resulting in a film that makes much out of little in the best possible way.

In short: The Raid: Redemption (2011)

Original title: Serbuan maut

Welshman in Indonesia's Gareth Evans's second (after the brilliant Merantau) Indonesian movie The Raid is one of those films that is easy to love but also exceedingly difficult to write about, for, like all the best action films, it really is a long series of first firefights, then stunts and extremely violent martial arts sequences, with only just the right amount of plot and characterisation to hold it all together, so not exactly a movie that invites analysis. And nothing even the best writer (which I am not) can do in a review can come close to the actual rush of just watching The Raid's actors move and hit and die.

On the plot level, this is cleverly basic stuff (instead of the idiotic basic plot style someone like Luc Besson prefers): a team of militarized police is assaulting a large apartment building to find and kill its owner, a gangster boss who manages the building as a free haven for other gangsters. Things go pear-shaped for the cops fast. At the point when half of them are already dying in a firefight with a horde of the building's tenants, the Sergeant of the team (Joe Taslim) learns that the superior who is with him on the raid has been lying to him, and the whole assault is not officially condoned at all; that means no reinforcements. Soon enough, there are only the sergeant, the bad superior, talented rookie cop Rama (Iko Uwais), and some cannon fodder characters left, and they are separated in the fighting to boot. Further complications - among them Rama's discovery of the fact that his brother Andi (Donny Alamsyah) is a right hand man of the main bad guy - ensue.

So yes, as a narrative, this is as bare-bones as it gets, but Evans (also responsible for the film's script, as well as its editing) knows exactly how to use the minimalist strokes of his plot to kickstart his characters into motion; and once they are in motion, they never really stop anymore. Or rather, when they stop it seems to be of mere exhaustion and therefore an absolute necessity. Exhaustion is actually a surprisingly important point in the film's action. Atypically for action cinema, Evans never seems to forget how much punishment his characters have actually taken during the course of the movie, and a part of the joy of The Raid is watching actors (with Merantau's returning Uwais as the clear star, and still able to fight at once elegant and brutal) perform ever escalating action sequences while looking progressively winded.

Another, even greater, part of said joy is experiencing Evans's sense of rhythm, the way editing, camera and actors work together to give the film a pulse that makes it closer to a long-form piece of music than a narrative. This is of course not atypical for martial arts cinema, but it's only done with as much consequence and perseverance as here in the very best examples of the genre, turning The Raid: Redemption into something special.

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On WTF: Merantau (2009)

While most of the world is celebrating Gareth Evans's Indonesian action movie The Raid, I'm catching up with the past and watch the director's first team-up with his star Iko Uwais.

Lucky me, because Merantau just happens to be a pretty fantastic martial arts movie well worth anybody's time. My column on WTF-Film goes into a bit more detail, so why not click on through? (Please don't answer that in the negative).

Technorati-Markierungen: indonesian movies,reviews,gareth evans,iko uwais,sisca jessica,mads koudal,martial arts,other places