Tom Hardy and The Raid director Gareth Evans team up for the Netflix crime thriller Havoc. After honing his action filmmaking skills on the obscure Singaporian film Merantau, Evans burst onto the international scene in a huge way with his acclaimed 2011 thriller The Raid: Redemption, an unrelenting action exercise showcasing the traditional Indonesian martial art pencak silat.
Featuring insane fight choreography from star Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian, The Raid established Evans as a budding master of high-tension action filmmaking. The director followed up that success with a 2014 sequel The Raid 2, but elected not to keep the string alive with a third Raid film (a Raid remake was at one time reportedly being developed by Joe Carnahan). Branching away from martial arts action, Evans turned to horror for 2018’s Apostle, starring Dan Stevens as a drifter pitted against a bizarre island religious cult. He then went to the world of television for the series Gangs of London, which ran on Sky in Britain and on AMC in America. Evans’ name was also once attached to a movie adaptation of DC’s Deathstroke, but in 2018 he revealed he was no longer developing the film, which he says would have been a dark take on the Deathstroke character.
Instead of heading to the DC Universe at the helm of a Deathstroke movie, Evans will next work with Hardy on the Netflix film Havoc. As reported by THR, the film sees Hardy playing a detective who must fight his way through the criminal underworld to rescue the son of a politician, while contending with the corruption and conspiracy gripping the city. The film is set to shoot in Wales.
Hardy obviously is no stranger to the world of action filmmaking himself, having starred in movies like Sucker Punch, The Dark Knight Rises, Mad Max: Fury Road and Venom. Of course Hardy’s varied career has also included some more prestige-minded efforts like the Oscar-winning The Revenant and the war drama Dunkirk, as well as TV work on the shows Peaky Blinders and Taboo. After starring in 2020’s notorious flop Capone, Hardy will next reprise the role of Eddie Brock in Venom: Let There Be Carnage, with Woody Harrelson joining him in the role of Carnage. Hardy is also reported to be starring in The Things They Carried, an adaptation of Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War novel.
Fans of action films indeed have reason to be overjoyed at the news that Hardy will be teaming up with Evans in what sounds like another ferocious and punishing bare-knuckle effort along the lines of The Raid and its sequel. Hardy undoubtedly has the physicality to pull off the kind of intricate and bruising fights Evans likes to feature in his movies, and Evans surely has the action chops to deliver the kind of non-stop thrills promised by a movie with a title like Havoc.
Source: THR