By plane, train, hunting rifle: “Havoc” and 6 other bloody action movies of recent years

The action movie genre, like any other genre, does not stand still, and every ten to fifteen years the audience gets a fundamentally new look at self-mutilation. The era of Jason Bourne’s high-speed montage came to an end in the mid-2010s, when detailed fight choreography came into vogue and the ultra-violence that New Hollywood and exploitation films from drive-in theaters had brought back. For the release of the next Evans action movie collected a selection of brutal modern action movies.

HAVOC, 2025

Genre: action, drama, thriller / UK
Directed by: Gareth Evans
Starring: Tom HardyTimothy OlyphantForest Whitaker

Shot back in 2021, Gareth Evans’ The Desolation finally blasts its way onto screens — and it’s pure meat for fans of raw, violent street poetry. With Tom Hardy and Forest Whitaker leading the charge, and a crew that clearly bled for the project, the film claws through production hell to deliver one hell of a payoff.

Evans — the mad genius who detonated the action scene in 2011 with the bone-crunching The Raid — hasn’t mellowed a bit. But this time, the chaos unfolds in his native Wales. At the center: Detective Walker (Hardy), diving headfirst into the underbelly of the British criminal world to rescue the kidnapped son of a high-ranking politician (Whitaker). And in true Evans fashion, the mission spirals into a symphony of blood, ballistic mayhem, and handheld camerawork so kinetic it feels like a fist to the face.

Fight or Flight, 2025

Genre: action, comedy / USA
Director: James Madigan
Starring: Josh Hartnett, Katie Sackhoff, Julian Kostov

Last year marked a wild comeback for Josh Hartnett, packing in more range than we’ve seen from him in over a decade. Oppenheimer had barely wrapped its victory lap through awards season when Trap, M. Night Shyamalan’s twisted new thriller, dropped — with Hartnett flashing a killer smile as a literal killer. Not long after, fans caught him slipping into the gritty kitchen chaos of The Bear, to the critics’ delight. Now, Exit Row kicks off the new film year with a bang — and it’s gunning straight for Hartnett’s comedic chops, though let’s be clear: between the one-liners, his character is swinging a chainsaw in ways OSHA would not approve.

Hartnett plays Lucas Reyes, a burned-out ex-special agent drinking his way through Bangkok after a mission went south. But then comes a shot at redemption — a black-ops gig to track down a shadowy hacker known only as Ghost. The plan? Board a commercial flight to San Francisco, locate Ghost mid-air, and detain him quietly before touchdown. Simple enough… until Reyes realizes the plane is also carrying an unknown assassin ready to spill blood the moment they ID their target. Now, it’s a mile-high guessing game with deadly stakes — and Hartnett, grizzled and unhinged, is right at the center of the turbulence.

The Night Comes for Us, 2018

Genre: action, thriller / Indonesia
Directed by: Timo Tjajanto
Starring: Iko Wais, Jo TaslimJulie, Estelle, Salvita Decorte

While Western action drowns in CGI and trauma metaphors, Indonesia keeps it old school — settling scores with a knife to the thigh and a machete to the skull. Timo Tjahjanto, one of the reigning kings of blood-soaked mayhem, isn’t just chasing the legacy of The Raid — he’s cranking up the onscreen carnage to a level that borders on myth. The Night Comes for Us delivers the kinetic chaos you’d expect from a Gareth Evans joint, but ups the ante by casting Iko Uwais — this time not as the savior, but as the final boss.

There’s a plot, technically — though it’s more a pause button between beatdowns. Ito (Joe Taslim), a ruthless killer, suddenly grows a conscience and decides to spare a young girl he was sent to kill. That one good deed lights the fuse: the mob wants him dead, old friends come calling, new enemies surface, and a couple of human meat grinders with personal grudges join the fray. Tjahjanto doesn’t pretend to reinvent storytelling — he puts every chip on the choreography of violence, and it pays off. Every fight feels handcrafted, mean, and unrelenting — so much so that The Raid itself occasionally looks like a warm-up drill.

This isn’t about emotional catharsis or Oscar bait. The Night Comes for Us is here to remind us what action used to feel like — raw, unfiltered, and VHS-grimy in the best way. Ready for the next title in this vein?

Deliver Us from Evil, 2020

Genre: action, thriller / Republic of Korea
Directed by: Hong Won-chan
Starring: Jung-min Hwang, Lee Jong-jae, Park Jong-min, Moon Choi

Back in the ’90s, Korean thrillers became a cornerstone of the “Asian extreme” wave — a genre boom marked by grim underworld tales and grotesque bursts of violence. Fast forward a couple decades, and director Hong Won-chan has carved out his own name in that legacy. His bleak action-thriller Deliver Us from Evil might just be his crowning achievement, transforming the usually charming Squid Game star Lee Jung-jae into a remorseless, designer-clad killing machine.

The story follows In-nam (Hwang Jung-min), a former spy turned contract killer, who’s ready to disappear to Panama and leave the blood behind. But just as he’s punching out, he learns two things: he has a daughter — and she’s been kidnapped. So much for retirement. The rescue mission pulls him deep into Thailand’s criminal underworld, while behind him trails a vengeful assassin (Jung-jae), dressed to kill and packing the emotional range of a steel trap. He’s less man than myth — like if John Woo reimagined Patrick Bateman.

Deliver Us from Evil won’t revolutionize the genre, but that’s not the point. It’s a taut, pulse-pounding spectacle that flexes muscle, mood, and menace — more than enough to leave most modern thrillers eating dust.

Revenge, 2017

Genre: action, thriller / France
Directed by: Coralie Farja
Starring: Mathilde Anne Ingrid Loots, Kevin Janssens

Before she turned body horror into a festival darling, Coralie Fargeat took aim at another volatile subgenre — the rape-revenge thriller, that raw, often exploitative staple of late-20th-century American grindhouse, where violated women return fire with a vengeance. Revenge may not roar as loudly as her later The Substance, but it’s cut from the same razor-sharp cloth — a bold manifesto soaked in blood and framed through a defiantly female gaze.

The film kicks off with a familiar setup: Jen (Matilda Lutz) tags along to a remote desert villa with Richard (Kevin Janssens), a married man playing bachelor for the weekend. She’s all wide-eyed flirtation, seemingly unbothered by the moral murk — or the sudden arrival of Richard’s hunting buddies, who show up early with guns, beer, and a palpable sense of menace. From there, Fargeat tears the genre’s rulebook to shreds. What begins as a sun-drenched getaway devolves into a waking nightmare — and Jen, brutalized and left for dead, doesn’t just survive. She ascends, transformed into a blood-soaked specter of vengeance, a mythic force that rewrites every power dynamic the genre ever relied on.

This isn’t just payback — it’s a feral reclamation, filmed with the furious precision of someone who’s not asking for your approval.

Upgrade, 2018

Lee Whannell’s savage, neo-Luddite sci-fi brawler Upgrade was dubbed “the thinking man’s Venom” when it dropped — and the comparison wasn’t just a snarky tagline. Both films feature an everyman host (here, Logan Marshall-Green — the unofficial low-budget Tom Hardy) who becomes the meat puppet for a chatty, violent entity living inside him. But where Venom flinched from its own chaos, Upgrade leans in — camera locked, eyes wide, savoring every shattered bone and snapped tendon with gleeful precision.

Set in a sleek but soulless near-future where AI and automation have swallowed everyday life, the story follows Grey Trace (Marshall-Green), a grease-stained mechanic with zero love for tech. That is, until a staged car crash leaves him paralyzed and his wife dead. Enter STEM — a secretive, ultra-advanced implant offered by a mysterious tech mogul. The device doesn’t just give Grey back control of his body — it turns him into a precision-tuned weapon, and it’s got a mind (and mouth) of its own. Together, man and machine launch a brutal campaign of revenge, painting sterile smart-houses and corporate labs with blood and broken circuitry.

Upgrade isn’t just a low-budget flex — it’s a slick, brutal howl against the encroaching digital future. And it’s got the fight scenes to back it up.

Kill, 2023

Genre: action, drama, adventure / India
Directed by: Nikhil Bhat
Starring: Lakshya, Raghav Joyal, Tanya Maniktala

No, Kill isn’t some Bollywood remake of Michael Mann’s legendary Heat — it’s more like a wild, inventive mash-up of John Wick and The Raid, soaked in high-octane Bollywood flair. At the center of it all is Amrit (Lakshya), a special forces vet and hopeless romantic from North India, who learns that his true love Tulika (Tanya Maniktala) is being forced into marriage by her well-connected businessman father. Naturally, he hops on a train to Delhi and pops the question — in the bathroom, no less. But just as love tries to conquer all, the train gets hijacked by a crew of cutthroat bandits led by the deranged Fani (Raghav Juyal), who quickly figures out Tulika’s ransom potential and decides to snatch her right out from under Amrit’s bloodied fists.

Like the trains it depicts, Kill takes its time gathering speed — but once it hits full throttle, there’s no emergency brake in sight. The entire film unfolds inside the claustrophobic hellscape of a passenger train, where the heroes and villains resort to anything within reach — trays, belts, luggage, even steel thermoses — to maim and survive. And the body count? Let’s just say the carpet of corpses gets thicker by the minute. Director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat embraces the theatrical beats of Indian cinema, but doesn’t settle for hollow spectacle. His villains are more than caricatures — they bleed, hesitate, and brood — and beneath the carnage, Kill builds a bruising meditation on the corrosive nature of revenge.

It’s brutal, it’s bold, and by the final stop, it’s earned its place among the genre’s fiercest contenders.