A blood-soaked love letter to Hong Kong action cinema and gritty ’70s Hollywood crime thrillers, Gareth Evans’s Havoc is a proper brute force ballet. At its heart is Tom Hardy’s compromised detective Walker, a frustrated family man burying his softer side beneath an uncompromising exterior and the loosest possible interpretation of Miranda Rights. His unnamed US city – potentially the most violent place on the planet – is a hive of corrupt politicians, warring triads, dodgy cops and some seriously overworked coroners.
To create his snowy cityscape bathed in Christmas lights, The Raid director turned to… South Wales. Somehow, Cardiff, Swansea and other South Wales locales were convincingly stitched together to create Havoc’s violent urban tableau. ‘We looked at New York, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia,’ Evans tells , ‘to find the bits and pieces that were cinematically interesting as we were creating this world. You get the odd person from America saying: “Oh, I recognise parts of this but not as a collective whole,” and then there’ll be people in Wales that are like: “I think that’s Swansea?”’
The director pulls back the curtain on his action spectacular to take us through the movie magic that turned a corner of Britain into a bullet-strewn US metropolis – without upsetting the locals.
What is Havoc?
A ’70s and ’80s-coded action flick that wears its Hong Kong cinema influences on its sleeve, Havoc is set in a wintry urban gangland where dodgy cops and violent Triads share dirty money and politicians are up to their necks in corruption. Brooding cop Walker’s (Hardy) attempts to shake off his debt to the city’s mayor Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker) leaves his cleaning up one final mess for the politician: Beaumont’s estranged son Charlie (Justin Cornwell) and his friends are on the run from Ching (Sunny Pang) and Mother (Yeo Yann Yann), two vicious Triad bosses who blame them for a drug deal spectacularly gone wrong. Walker, Beaumont insists, must rescue them.
But Walker has a past of his own. He was once caught up with Vincent (Timothy Olyphant), a crooked cop with blood on his hands. Upstanding police officer Ellie (Jessie Mei Lei) is the one shining light in this murky, deadly cityscape. Can she stop this tinderbox going up in flames? Nope…
Where is Havoc set?
Gareth Evans, a filmmaker who cut his teeth in Indonesia making silat martial arts-inspired action flicks like Merantau and The Raid, headed home to South Wales to build and shoot the movie’s world. Yes, somehow Havoc takes Cardiff, Swansea and other Welsh locations and convincingly transforms them into a wintery East Coast metropolis.
‘We travelled around Swansea, Cardiff and Port Talbot, looking for anything that we could dress to feel like Americana,’ remembers Evans. ‘As long as we had maybe 30, 40 percent in camera, the rest we could augment with VFX. With just the right amount of imagination, you can get away with it.’ Here’s where – and how – he did it:
Cardiff Bay’s Pierhead Building: the police precinct
From Beverly Hills Cop to The French Connection, the first thing any good US cop movie needs is a police precinct. Swansea’s Guildhall was used for exterior shots, with Ford Crown police cars parked outside, while the Pierhead Building in Cardiff offered its interior space. ‘We had fun turning that into our little American precinct,’ says Evans. ‘One downside was that we shot in the middle of half term and we had to close the fair outside the building for two days. To any parents and their children that got really disappointed that day, we are very sorry.’
Bute Street, Cardiff: the snowy American boulevard
Were Cardiff locals bemused to find one of the city’s main thoroughfares, Bute Street, transformed into a wintry American boulevard? ‘We filmed in summer too,’ remembers Evans. ‘Everyone was really polite – and we were shooting nights, so it must have been quite an interruption. It’s this great, cinematic-looking street in the middle of Cardiff Bay.’
Brangwyn Hall, Swansea: the meeting between Walker and the mayor
Famous for its British Empire Panels and its ornate, imposing concert hall, this Swansea municipal building turned fully American for Havoc. ‘We shot almost every corner of that space,’ explains Evans. ‘It gave us the exterior of the police precinct, the corridor leading towards the big ballroom where Tom (Hardy) and Forest (Whitaker) have their first face-to-face. It was so grand.’
Seren Stiwdios: the club fight scene
Not everything in Havoc could be done on location and Wales’ sophisticated array of film studios came into play, especially for a centrepiece club sequence in which Walker attempts to fight off a good handful of violent gangs – at the same time. ‘I’ve never been this self-indulgent with a set build before,’ laughs Evans. ‘That nightclub is such an engineering feat. It was a really difficult undertaking for the art department, but they came up trumps.’
Kon Tiki, Swansea: the convenience store
This Swansea cocktail bar was transformed into the convenience store where Walker buys his kid a hasty Christmas present and then reused as a different location later in the movie. ‘They have a mural painted all over the walls of that place, but we had to cover it,’ says Evans. ‘They were very generous with their space.’
Swansea University’s Bay Campus: the limo ambush sequence
The action ramps up again when the Triad’s top assassin (Michelle Waterson) leads a motorbike assault on Forest Whitaker’s politician as his limo is gridlocked by city traffic. IRL, the traffic is less of problem, explains Evans. ‘This is on Fabian Way at the new university buildings and we only had like half a road – the rest of it went off to green countryside. Everything on the left is real, everything on right was VFX augmentation. It was really great work [by the VFX teams].’
Cardiff’s AB Ports: Raul’s junkyard
In Havoc, the legendary Luis Guzman plays a junkyard owner who is desperate to keep Mia (Quelin Sepulveda) safe from the Triads. Walker pays him a visit that draws him into the criminal chaos. Those sequences were filmed at Cardiff’s port complex on the Severn Estuary.
Merthyr Mawr, Bridgend: Walker’s fishing shack
The sharp end of the movie takes place in a remote fishing shack. Evans had used the real location – the coastal village of Merthyr Mawr – in his 2018 horror movie Apostle, and he returned for a last-stand sequence that he likens to the church battle in John Woo’s The Killer. ‘We kept building these little wooden structures that we’d shoot to pieces,’ he explains. ‘We built a set on location, but because of all the little moving parts [of the sequence], we shot another version of it on the [sound]stage.’
Baglan, Port Talbot: the rail yard showdown
A classic location for a Hollywood crime thriller showdown, Havoc found its unexpectedly American-looking rail yard in the coastal town of Port Talbot. ‘In the little village I grew up in, you’d hear trains going past from the coal mines,’ remembers Evans. ‘Coal would be so identifiably Welsh, so to find a big lumber yard with huge logs on the backs of trains was perfect. It’s that slice of American life I wanted.’
When is Havoc on Netflix?
The movie is streaming on Netflix worldwide now.
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