TheBabayaga

A follow up to The Raid franchise was always going to be a tall order, even for action maestro Gareth Evans himself. Despite offering some kinetic and hyper-violent action sequences, Havoc really falls short of what was expected of Evans and his team. In fact they truly muffed it.

Impressively, Havoc was filmed entirely in Cardiff, which resembles absolutely nothing of an inner city in America. Throughout Havoc, Evans makes use of cheaply distracting Playstation 3 era graphics to recreate an unnamed, discount version of Sin City where this oddly confusing story takes place.

Even the vehicles (I guess because the production team couldn't source real Cadillacs), including at one point a physics-defying police car and lorry, are heavily, awfully rendered. Honestly, the laughable graphics used here was comparable to the CGI used in those town planning videos by local council. I felt embarrassed watching it.

There's no plot and yet it's somehow overstuffed with characters you really won't care for. You won't even remember their names. Tom Hardy, who practically carries the light weight of this film on his shoulders, is fine enough as a grizzled and corrupt detective, whilst Whitaker and Timothy Olyphant are both criminally underused.

At least Havoc, when it does eventually get going, does kind of live up to its title. Whilst the story plays havoc with logic and plot convenience, it does (barely perhaps) make up for it with some kinetic and violent bursts of action, including a chaotic sequence inside a nightclub (a typical setting nowadays in such one-man-army films) and one memorable use of a harpoon. Havoc comes alive at these points but overall it's not enough to detract from its other many flaws.

Havoc only had to be half as good as The Raid, but sadly and confusingly, it not even anywhere near half as good.

I'm sure I've only ever shed a tear at three films: The Green Mile, The Reader and The Whale. I may have also shed a tear or two during the final episodes of After Life and 1883. I have watched hundreds, if not thousands of films and TV shows.

This final powerful episode of Adolescence truly made me sob for several minutes after the closing credits. This felt awfully real and it's hard to fathom that families experience this kind of tragedy on a daily basis.

This is an emotionally raw and devastating final episode, sold with an absolute conviction by writer and star Stephen Graham. This for me was the most difficult of the four episodes to sit through, and not just because of the final 2 mins in the son's bedroom. The ripple effect of Jamie's actions has not only destroyed the lives of the victim's family, but his own family too, as they are left to answer for what he did.

It was utterly heartbreaking to watch Jamie's parents try to make any sense of their son's actions and whether they could have done anything different to prevent their son's descent into insecurity and misguided, misogynistic anger, which ultimately led him on a path to murder a fellow female classmate. Memories the parents discussed about Jamie suggested their son was dead and to an extent that was true. The son they thought they knew was dead.

Narratively speaking, this episode is slightly undercooked and the series as a whole offered no definitive answers. The writers try to say a lot, but the ideas aren't fully realised, limited I think by a runtime of less than 4 hours and the need I think for a fifth episode to explore beyond its own hints. It does leave you with more questions than it does answers.

I can't say I've enjoyed the experience of watching Adolescence and I will likely never be able to bring myself to watch this again. I sat there throughout with a heavy heart and a beating lump in my stomach. What makes this all the more difficult are the show's timely and scarily relevant themes. No doubt this is an important watch, and there are lessons to be taught and conversations to be had, not just about youth knife crime, but misconceptions around sex, the dated principles of masculinity and the power of the internet and its detrimental impact on mental health, self-worth and body image.