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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The loss of actor Lee Sun-kyun casts a chill shadow over Korea’s film world | Peter Bradshaw

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Lee, who has died aged 48, was a homegrown star who graduated to global fame in the multi-award-winning Parasite

K-class, K-prestige and K-artistry found their apogee in the movies with Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning 2019 smash Parasite – and this colossally successful South Korean social satire certainly found a place for one of that country’s biggest stars.

In his 40s and in his prime, with a string of blue-chip movie credits and a home-turf household name due to his TV work, Lee Sun-kyun displayed in Parasite his discreet charisma and sleek movie-star handsomeness with a sexual presence that could be dialled up or down.

It was a supporting role, and his character – destined here to be upstaged – was the karmic opposite of the star, Song Kang-ho, who played Kim, the rackety head of a predatory family of petty criminals who infiltrate a wealthy household as an apparently unrelated bunch of live-in servants. Their employer is Mr Park, played by Lee, a well-to-do man with a picture-perfect lifestyle who is, perhaps, Jekyll to Kim’s Hyde, but Lee’s performance radiated a kind of smugness in the glamour.

Fans of Lee might well have savoured the residual aura of sexuality that he brought with him – from movies where he played a married man having (or ambiguously about to have) a forbidden relationship.

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