Havoc
Havoc
After a drug deal gone wrong, a bruised detective must fight his way through the criminal underworld to rescue a politician's estranged son, unraveling a deep web of corruption and conspiracy that ensnares his entire city.
RipLinesMan reviewedApril 24, 2025
Event Horizon (1997) tore open the fabric of space and sanity to show us the abyss, but Havoc slashes into the heart of urban decay with just as much ferocity—only this time, the hellscape is manmade, and it breathes corruption. Directed with surgical precision by Gareth Evans, Havoc feels like a spiritual cousin to Paul W.S. Anderson’s sci-fi horror, trading haunted starships for crime-ridden cityscapes, and replacing the supernatural with the chillingly systemic. Tom Hardy delivers a volcanic performance as the war-torn detective—a man whose moral compass spins violently as he wades deeper into a mire of violence and political rot. His descent mirrors that of Sam Neill’s Dr. Weir, who, in Event Horizon, becomes both architect and victim of his own damnation.
The characters in both films act as lightning rods for their environments. Just as Laurence Fishburne’s Captain Miller anchors Event Horizon with a righteous fury and reluctant empathy, Forest Whitaker in Havoc brings a quiet gravity that keeps Hardy’s chaos tethered, however tenuously, to something resembling hope. These are not heroes in the traditional sense—they are men clawing against inevitability, screaming into the void, and daring it to scream back.
Cinematographically, Havoc trades the baroque, cathedral-like horror of a doomed spaceship for noir-soaked alleyways and crumbling institutions. But the sense of claustrophobia, of walls closing in both physically and psychologically, is shared. Evans channels dread like Anderson did—slow, deliberate, with moments of operatic violence punctuating long silences filled with tension.
Havoc may lack the literal portal to hell that made Event Horizon iconic, but it conjures its own inferno from human nature, corruption, and guilt. It is a meditation on entropy, not of stars, but of souls. And much like Event Horizon, it leaves you unnerved, unsettled, and deeply, darkly moved.