At The Movies: Queer’s star plumbs new depths, Havoc falters outside action scenes

Queer (R21)

135 minutes, opens on May 1
★★★★☆

The story: William Lee (Daniel Craig) is an American in 1950s Mexico City, a lonely exile cruising gay bars until the day he sights a spiffy stranger new in town and becomes hopelessly besotted.

Do not think James Bond. Recall instead the 1998 British biopic Love Is The Devil, in which Craig played the seedy boy toy of infamous English artist Francis Bacon.

The Hollywood leading man started out as a raw character actor, and Queer by Italian director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, 2017; Challengers, 2024) is an adaptation of Beat Generation countercultural icon William S. Burroughs’ 1985 autobiographical novella that brings the actor full circle.

As William, a Burroughs surrogate, he is now the middle-aged dissolute in a tale of romantic obsession with a young former serviceman.

Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) is this Adonis, with the aloofness of someone aware of how good-looking he is. He is unreadable and may not even be queer.

William does get him into the sack. Still, he gets no closer to his beloved’s heart.

Against Guadagnino’s sensual, shimmering imagery and an oozy score by his regular American alt-rock collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, William sweats desire, neediness, shame, cheap tequila and heroin through his cream linen suits.

His desperation takes him into the Amazon jungle, in search of a psychotropic botanical he hopes will grant him the telepathy to connect with Eugene.

The movie, comprising three disparate chapters plus an epilogue, is thereafter hallucinatory.

It meanders, and can be shallow and showy. But Craig’s agony is genuine. He turns such artiness as William’s subsequent disembodiment, spinning across a lifetime’s solitude, into an expression of self-annihilating love.

Hot take: Craig’s aching performance leaves you shaken and stirred.

Havoc (NC16)

105 minutes, available on Netflix ★★☆☆☆

The story: After a narcotics deal goes wrong, a burned-out homicide detective (Tom Hardy) must battle a ruthless underworld syndicate and citywide corruption to rescue a politician’s son.

Havoc unfolds in an anonymous urban hellscape of socioeconomic despair and neo-noir genre cliches. It is a saga of revenge and redemption with nothing not seen before, except Malaysian actress Yeo Yann Yann shooting gangsters dead.

English actor Hardy stars as the brooding anti-hero Walker Mackey, tormented by the demons of his past.

Forest Whitaker plays a crooked mayoral candidate whose son (Justin Cornwell) is suspected of stealing drug money and is on the run from Yeo’s vengeful triad matriarch and her lieutenant (Singapore’s Sunny Pang).

The gangland intrigue is further complicated by a squad of dirty cops. The lone good officer is Walker’s idealistic rookie partner (Jessie Mei Li) – she, too, a stock character.

All will converge midway for a bone-cracking brawl in a nightclub recently vacated by John Wick. Here, at least, despite the predictability, Welsh writer-director Gareth Evans shows his chops. The architect of the apartment block punch-ups The Raid (2011) and its sequel The Raid 2 (2014) can really stage hyper-violence.

There are a good three or four major action set pieces. The opening sees a washing machine chucked out the back of the criminals’ speeding truck, through the windshield of a pursuing police car, and the climax is an orgy of savagery in a woodland cabin.

How could a movie of such adrenalised carnage featuring every gonzo use of human limbs, weaponry, broken glass and even a fishing harpoon be so lazy in its story?

Hot take: Formulaic in plot, this crime drama scores only in its body count.