Our Fault review – ultra-glossy Spanish step-sibling melodrama is too bland to be annoying

Third film adapted from the romance novels by Mercedes Ron, originally written in Spanish, feels clunky and cliched This is the third film in a series, after My Fault in 2023 and Your Fault in 2024 , that have been adapted from the Culpable trilogy, romance novels by Mercedes Ron, originally written in Spanish. It’s obviously aimed at a specific market that expects a certain blend of melodrama, softcore sex and lush lifestyle porn, and (more importantly) is invested already in the trilogy’s story. Given those parameters, it probably delivers – although the dialogue, at least judging by the subtitles, is super clunky and cliched. Complete outsiders coming to this cold may be a little baffled by what’s going on, since this concluding instalment makes no effort to fill in any blanks. But even total newbies will get the gist that heroine Noah (Nicole Wallace) still has feelings for her ex Nick (Gabriel Guevara) – who also, somewhat disturbingly, was once her stepbrother, although their ...

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

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-type cityscape where the drama takes place feels too artificial to me. (The film was actually shot in Cardiff.) Tom Hardy, doing his wheezy-nasal and faintly Cagney tough guy voice, plays Walker, a disillusioned but basically decent cop, who has found himself coerced into doing dirty work for corrupt politician Lawrence Beaumont, played by Forest Whitaker.

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