HAVOC Trailer Breakdown: Gareth Evans On Tom Hardy, Assassins, And Washing Machine Kills

If your movie’s called HAVOC, you need to cause some havoc. And who better to bust skulls, blow brains, and hit hard than the combination of director Gareth Evans, and star Tom Hardy? Evans has serious form in wince-worthy action as the filmmaker behind The Raid and The Raid 2, this time swapping martial artistry for the burly physicality of Hardy – as a cop on a mission who’s about to have a seriously bad couple of days.

Evans’ long-awaited return to action cinema (or, action Netflick) is just weeks away – and with the new trailer bringing fresh “oof!”s aplenty, Empire hopped on the blower with him to get a taste of the mayhem. Sorry, the havoc.

Walker, driver

The trailer begins with a shot of a flashing police light sitting on top of a cop car, and then we meet said cop: Walker, played by Tom Hardy. “He’s a morally compromised homicide detective,” says Evans, “who, two days before Christmas, just wants to get presents for his daughter and reconcile his relationship with them.” But life is what happens when you’re busy making plans. Or, in this case, death. Lots and lots of death...

Massacre in Chinatown

...because Walker is called in to investigate what looks like a massacre, the outcome of a drug heist gone wrong. Very wrong. “There was an intent with the design of the trailer to let people know that this will get quite gnarly in places,” says Evans, explaining the various shots of gang members being shot to ribbons. “That was actually technically Day Zero of our production schedule. It was an opportunity to camera test and SFX test, and test the light setups. And we ended up morphing it into a day of production. It was a baptism of fire.” Start as you mean to go on.

Public enemy number one

Amidst shots of the bloody bullet bonanza, Walker’s new partner Ellie (Jessie Mei Li) brings him footage of the chief suspect. “Do you know him?” She asks. And Walker does. Because this is Charlie (Justin Cornwell), a young and desperate man way in over his head. And he’s connected. Very connected.

Mayor Forest

“My son is not a killer!” yells Lawrence Beaumont, the mayor of the unnamed American city in which HAVOC (yes, the title is in all caps — an indication of just how much havoc we can reasonably expect) takes place. Because, as it turns out, Charlie is his estranged son. “For the first time in a long time for Lawrence to hear anything about his son, and for it to be about his kid being the lead suspect in a mass murder in Chinatown, it’s fairly catastrophic,” says Evans. Beaumont entrusts Walker with a task: track down Charlie and his girlfriend Mia (Quelin Sepulveda), before other interested parties find them. “That’s Walker’s mission over the course of the next two days.” Easier said than done…

It’s Vincent

We get a sense of the odds stacking up against Walker, as we meet Timothy Olyphant’s cop, Vincent, who becomes embroiled in the affair when Charlie’s getaway ends up seriously injuring one of his men. “Everyone’s morally grey in this film,” adds Evans. “And you have this group of policemen who are hunting Charlie and Mia down in order to find them, maybe to arrest them, maybe to take the law into their own hands.”

Bad mother

“Your son just started a gang war!” Walker tells Beaumont. And here we see Yann Yann Yeo as the woman behind one of those gangs, a grieving mother who will stop at nothing to avenge her son’s death. “She’s a fantastic actor,” says Evans. “When she turns up, that’s when the screws tighten on the whole narrative. She’s coming in as the hero of her own movie. In her head, she’s in the right for doing what she’s doing.”

Meet un-cute

“I’m here to get you out!” yells Walker, as he catches up with Charlie and Mia in a nightclub known as The Medusa. He has a funny way of showing it, as he puts a gun to Mia’s head in an attempt to coerce them both. “We’re showing Walker’s ability to spin on a dime and be ruthless when needed to,” says Evans. But his attitude towards Charlie and Mia may well soften. “It’s less about, ‘Can I keep this one boy alive for my own selfish benefit?’ and [more], ‘Is there a way I can keep them both alive, because they deserve to live.’”

Assassin assassinates

Fans of Evans’ work will know that his antagonists are usually terrifying, near-unstoppable figures (see The Raid’s Mad Dog or The Raid 2’s Hammer Girl for details). Eagle-eyed viewers will have noticed a blonde woman standing behind Yann Yann Yeo in that earlier shot — this is Michelle Waterson as an assassin known only as, erm, The Assassin, who will be the latest addition to Evans’ pantheon of unkillable bastards. And in this sequence, we get to see her take out some rivals in a broad daylight assault. “Michelle’s an amazing UFC fighter that Jude Poyer, my stunt coordinator, had been speaking highly of for years,” says Evans. “We wanted her to come in and own it.” Interestingly, this sequence was shot in Swansea. ‘Dai Hard With A Vengeance’, anyone?

Into The Medusa

“All hell breaks loose” is how Evans describes the sprawling battle that takes place in a nightclub known as The Medusa, as several interested parties come together to clash. It’s murder on the dance floor, alright. “We have Walker against his own cops, and a marauding band of Triads who just flood the nightclub with iron bars and machetes and meat cleavers and knives,” says Evans, who marshalled the mayhem on a specially-constructed multi-level set. In many ways, it’s the biggest sequence of Evans’ career to date. “Certainly in terms of balancing the POVs and the narratives,” he acknowledges. “The kitchen fight in The Raid 2 was a huge undertaking, but I only have to check in on two people.”

Walker, fighter

We get a brief glimpse of some of the bone crunching collisions that happen in the Medusa fight, including a shot where Walker ends up on the ground, and we see his upside down POV as a gang member flies through the air and nearly takes his head off. “When we come up with the action, how do we find the best shot possible and give the audience something fresh?” says Evans of his meticulous approach to action, which involves planning out every shot ahead of time. “I don’t shoot coverage, I never shoot master shots of anything. That’s an example — we wanted something specific that would tie into Walker’s confusion, and the relentlessness of the action.”

Yes, that is Luis Guzmàn

He’s only in one shot of the trailer, but what a shot it is, as Luis Guzmàn’s Raul dispenses justice in the Medusa sequence. “He’s an uncle figure to Mia, and he gets embroiled in everything,” says Evans of Guzmàn’s character. “He was a wonderful, wonderful human being. I’d work with him again in a heartbeat.”

A warning to Walker

“Don’t forget,” says Beaumont, in a glimpse of his confrontation with Walker, “I know what you did.” “You have no idea what I did,” snarls Walker. Presumably, we’ll find out at some point just what it was that he did. “Oh, we definitely find out,” teases Evans. “It speaks to the past and the things that bind Tom and Tim’s characters together. It’s the ugly, dark secret that pervades across the film.”

He’s a cal-goner

“It’s kinda hard to dodge a fucking washing machine,” deadpans Richard Harrington’s cop Jake, one of Vincent’s gang. And he’s not wrong, as we see a shot of the breakneck chase that draws Vincent and the boys into the fray, culminating in a washing machine filled with cocaine being launched through the air and right into the kisser of one of their own (Serhat Metin’s Cortez). “This begins our movie,” says Evans. Incredibly, much of the car chase is CG. “We built on the stage a section of highway. It’s an amazing piece of work from Duke, our VFX vendors, within a 3D space using Unreal Engine. It was an amazing experience. I was able to figure out every shot of that truck chase without ever having to risk anybody’s safety.”

Shack attack

For anyone wondering why the film’s called HAVOC, the trailer’s final thirty seconds or so answers that emphatically, with shots of the film’s frenetic showdown between Walker and a small army in a fishing shack. It peaks with a gloriously gratuitous supercut of superkills, as various brave stuntmen are stabbed, skewered, stomped and sliced in stupendously gory fashion. “We lovingly refer to this last section of the movie as, ‘There’s only one thing left to do now: kill everyone’” laughs Evans. “In the trailer, it feels like the same thing. The only thing left to do is show a load of people getting hurt in lots of different ways.” For Evans, this particular slice of action is the juice. “This is the one [sequence] that I’m maybe most proud of,” he says. “And the sound design is incredible. I can’t wait for people to hear this as loudly as they possibly can.” Crank up those soundbars on April 25. Havoc awaits your eardrums.

HAVOC comes to Netflix on 25 April