There’s no question what every single person who watches the new Tom Hardy Netflix movie, Havoc, will be talking about this weekend: the Havoc cabin fight scene. This jaw-dropping, climactic, six-minute, non-stop action sequence has all the blood-splattering, bullet-filled, brutality that fans of director Gareth Evans have come to expect. After all, this is the guy who brought us The Raid movies. He has a reputation to live up to, and with the Havoc cabin fight scene, he more than lives up to it. Sure, it’s only April, but it’s hard to imagine any other 2025 action scene topping this.
Written and directed by Evans, Havoc stars Tom Hardy as a grizzled police detective named Walker with a dark secret, indebted to his city’s corrupt mayor (played by Forest Whitaker). When the mayor’s son gets caught up in a violent gang war, Walker agrees to rescue the kid, Charlie (Justin Cornwell), in exchange for Walker’s freedom. Walker does eventually track Charlie down, and brings him and Charlie’s girlfriend Mia (Quelin Sepulveda) to a fishing cabin in the woods for safety. Unfortunately, the Chinese Triad mob boss (Yeo Yann Yann) tracks them down, and wants revenge for her own son’s death.
Between the three of them, Walker, Mia, and Charlie all kick some serious Triad butt. But it’s certainly not easy, and it’s definitely not pretty. It’s pure, visceral violence, with zero background music, so you can hear every horrible squelch, crunch, and groan.
It starts with the guns, featuring perhaps the most bullets fired in a five-minute span that I’ve ever witnessed on screen. The bad guys blast out the windows, but the good guys get plenty of kill shots in, blowing their victims off their feet in exaggerated slow-motion and stylistic blood splatters.
At one point, Hardy blasts a shot gun round that rips right through a wooden door and into a bad guy’s stomach. Evans accentuates this kill with a gnarly point-of-view shot from the other side of the blood-tattered hole.
There’s barely time to process “one perfect shots” (pun intended) like that, because it’s already on to the next. After the mafia guys breach the cabin, it’s an all-out bloodbath. Both Mia and Charlie get their time to shine—Mia fires a hand gun into a bad guy who falls in slow motion out of the cabin, while Charlie absolutely annihilates a dude holding down the trigger of a machine gun with gun barrel lodged directly into his victim’s gut.
Evans uses the many gun explosions to artfully light this sequence, giving viewers brief, violent flashes of brightness—and vivid red blood—in the dark.
But it’s not just gun play. Eventually, Hardy’s seemingly endless bullet supply runs dry, so he starts stabbing dudes in the throat and bashing their heads into loose nails. Here’s where Evans has some fun with the fishing shack setting, like the moment where Hardy pierces a guy’s cheek with a fishhook, as if he were the catch of the day.
The whole sequence culminates in an epic hand-to-hand battle between Hardy and MMA fighter Michelle Waterson, who plays a high-ranking mafia member credited simply as “assassin” in the film’s credits. Using her impressive martial arts skills, the assassin absolutely kicks Hardy’s butt, though he does get a few good swings in.
We think it’s all over for Hardy after Waterson tosses him into a load-bearing pillar, and the cabin roof collapses on his head. Waterson stomps forward to dig him out and finish the job. But Hardy is ready for her. When she clears away the debris, she finds Hardy ready and waiting, with a harpoon gun pointed directly at her face. Evans buttons up this brutal action sequence with this one, final, grotesque kill: Hardy fires the harpoon through Waterson’s neck. It shoots out the other side and lodges into the wall, pinning her like laundry on a clothes line. Only, this laundry chokes up blood, falls to her knees, and dies.
It’s the perfect bloody, violent punchline to this savage, six-minute sequence. Those familiar with Evans’ previous work won’t be surprised—and might even pick up some similarities in this fight to his 2011 Indonesian action thriller The Raid. In an interview for the Havoc press notes, Evans revealed those similarities are intentional.
“It became a bit of a thinly-veiled homage to what we did in The Raid, but all within one sequence,” Evans said of the Havoc cabin fight scene. “It’s like a condensed version of The Raid, in that they start with guns, that then goes to sharp weapons, and then when they get knocked out of hands, it becomes hand-to-hand. I’m really proud of that sequence. There are some really good punchlines in there.”
In the same interview, stunt coordinator and action designer Jude Poyer added that Waterson—a UFC athlete and former Invicta FC Atomweight Champion—got some real punches in. “There’s plenty of times in HAVOC where you will see Michelle kicking Tom, for instance,” Poyer said. “Real contact is being made. And Tom is hitting these very, very talented stunt people from Hong Kong that we were able to bring over, who kind of get insulted if you don’t make contact!”
Honestly, after seeing that cabin fight scene play out on screen, it’s a miracle no one died.
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