Cry. Havoc lets loose the dogs of snore.

Tom Hardy spends most of Havoc looking like a man who’s been forced to punch his way out of every scene just to escape the script. His character, Walker, lumbers through Gareth Evans’ long-delayed Netflix outing like the ghost of action cinema past – not the swaggering 80s kind, mind you, but the mid-2000s straight-to-DVD variety, where every confrontation is a chore and every plot point wheezes under the weight of genre expectation.

This is a film that begins in the wreckage of a drug deal and proceeds to flatten everything else around it – tension, character, coherence – with the same blunt force monotony. Hardy’s detective isn’t so much solving a case as trudging through a seemingly endless succession of grimy stairwells and interchangeable thugs, like a live-action side-scroller with none of the joy. Somewhere in the grey-on-grey sludge of its aesthetic choices and relentless shoot-punch-repeat cycle, Havoc starts to feel like it’s punishing the viewer for showing up.

Evans, whose The Raid and The Raid 2 redefined the choreography of onscreen violence with frenetic clarity and jaw-dropping ingenuity, seems strangely unbothered here. The fight scenes are serviceable, if not outright stale, like b-sides from a far better album. They go on. And on. And on. The camera captures every grimace, every broken bottle and strained grunt, but never locates a rhythm or a reason. It’s all so emphatically serious, so oppressively committed to its own mood, that it starts to feel less like an action thriller and more like an endurance test for Tom Hardy’s bones.

The supporting cast reads like a prestige drama’s dream list: Forest Whitaker, Timothy Olyphant, Jessie Mei Li. None of them is given much to do beyond standing in shadows, stating the obvious, or pointing guns. Whitaker at least musters some gravity, but he’s stranded in a subplot that evaporates almost as quickly as it’s introduced. Olyphant, usually a scene-stealer, is neutered by a script that treats charisma like a contaminant while Jessie Mei Li offers a faint pulse of humanity, which is promptly ignored by the rest of the film in favour of yet another corridor confrontation.

Havoc tries to cloak its banality in grime and grit, but there’s no texture here – just layers of damp. The dialogue is mostly people growling mission statements at each other, like they’ve mistaken monosyllabic posturing for meaningful exchange. It’s a movie where everyone has a past, no one has a personality, and all roads lead to the same shootout in a warehouse full of conveniently stacked crates. You can feel it longing to be taken seriously, but that ambition curdles into tedium when stretched over two hours with nothing new to say.

It’s not that Havoc is incompetently made – it isn’t. It’s just assembled from the spare parts of better films, smothered in mood lighting and sound design so self-important it might as well come with permanent subtitles reading “gritty whispering”. But competence without imagination quickly becomes a slog. And no amount of Tom Hardy headbutting his way through morally bankrupt gangsters can disguise the fact that this is a film with no energy, no insight, and no sense of why we should care.

By the time the credits finally roll, Havoc has managed the impressive feat of making unrelenting violence feel dull. It’s all muscle, no momentum – a hollow, heavy-footed echo of Evans’ former glory, dragging its cast through the motions with the mechanical precision of a production line. It wants to be bruising and bold. What it is, instead, is a long night of broken noses and broken promises, delivered with all the enthusiasm of a grizzled cop’s paperwork.