Havoc review – Tom Hardy’s gonzo gun mayhem misses the point

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Disillusioned cop Hardy must rescue a corrupt politician’s son from triads and police but potential for drama goes down in a hail of bullets The title is appropriate. Welsh director Gareth Evans is the action maestro who rocked our world with his superb skull-rattling thrillers The Raid and The Raid 2 ; this new one for Netflix certainly has its fair share of OTT gonzo mayhem. Shootouts in cramped interiors and in the open air sometimes seem to go on so long that the gunfire feels like an extended drumroll. Dozens of people get riddled with bullets from automatic weaponry; they all go into that shoulder-rolling, arm-waving, blood-spurting choreography. At one stage, a comatose and heavily bandaged person in a hospital bed gets the same machine gun treatment, and even this poor guy has to jitterbug, infinitesimally and horizontally, in his hospital pyjamas as he gets filled full of lead. But frankly the action and the violence is too chaotic and almost meaningless and the CGI-Gotham-...
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Luther: The Fallen Sun review – grisly violence takes starring role

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Feature incarnation of the Idris Elba cop drama sees a ropey but savage snuff-porn plot get too much explicit attention

Neil Cross’s smash-hit BBC TV crime drama now gets its own standalone feature film, with Idris Elba returning as the troubled London police officer John Luther, effectively continuing the story from the end of the fifth season. This may well play very effectively to the show’s fanbase and there’s certainly an alpha supporting cast including Cynthia Erivo, Andy Serkis and Hattie Morahan.

But I have to say – and those squeamish about spoilers and cliches had better look away now – that without the extended context of longform TV, the greater emphasis on explicit, violent horror is a bit exhausting. The serial-killer accessories feel hand-me-down; the Scandi noir touch is spurious and storylines in the movies about evil criminal plans to livestream snuff-porn are frankly always lame and implausible. At the dawn of the internet age, the snuff-internet-porn-themed film actually became its own yucky and naive subgenre, with movies such as Marc Evans’s My Little Eye and Olivier Assayas’s Demonlover, and it doesn’t deserve a comeback now.

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