Becoming The Muse

Havoc and Bombshell

This post was supposed to be a review of the Netflix action flick Havoc, starring Tom Hardy… as Tom Hardy… playing Patrick Walker, a homicide detective who moonlights as a fixer for a powerful tycoon.

If you’re a die-hard Tom Hardy fan, you’ll probably watch it just to see him grunt, punch, bleed, and grunt some more. He delivers his usual signature performance: brooding, gruff, and physical; the cinematic lovechild of John Wick, John Rambo, and John McClane, someone missed an opportunity to name his character John Walker.

Havoc is a shoot-em-up film on steroids; a ballet of bullets and falling bodies. It has all the emotional depth of a razor blade and just enough plot to string together the chaos. But then again, it’s literally called HAVOC.

Havoc a noun that means devastation or total mayhem.
Havoc is often wreaked by hurricanes, angry mobs, plundering Vikings, and wild parties that get out of control

Then I started to wonder, if the purpose of movies like these is to feed us a dangerous fantasy. That deep down, we’re just waiting for someone else to go full action hero and save the day, while we livestream and #hashtag.

Which brings me, to Comrade Bombshell.

If you know, you know. If you don’t, he is a local war veteran turned viral protest content creator Blessed Geza — Comrade Bombshell. He burst into a meme-worthy fame during a press briefing, in response to talk of the president seeking to extend his term beyond 2030, he quipped that the only 2030 the president would see was “on a watch.”

Bombshell has taken to YouTube to do 8:30pm broadcasts, as a nod to that ticking 2030 political time bomb; calling for protest marches and indefinite stay-aways, until either the president resigns, gets impeached or a military intervention results in not only his removal but of the corrupt elements surrounding him, zvigananda.

Think of him as a resistance broadcaster… without a visible resistance movement.

Because, well… when he called for a protest on 31 March, people stayed at home. When he called for a national stay-away, people went to work, some, ironically, to protest for their low wages. Protest within a protest… a meta-struggle.

Someone once joked (and I was reminded of this while watching Havoc) that the only way this country might be freed from corruption is if one man singlehandedly marches to the State House, armed to the teeth, breaches the perimeter and battles the elite security forces, secures the president, and encourages him to do right by the country or so help him Nehanda’s risen bones.

*Cues heroic music. Camera pans out. Screen fades to black.*

Of course, that’s not how it works in the real world. That’s movie logic.

What would it take for us to stop waiting for a real-life Hardy or a Comrade or a General to do the things, and instead collectively say: “we the people have had enough.”