There’s a vitalness to Gareth Evans’ filmmaking that is yet to lose momentum. First felt in 2011’s The Raid, when the film’s compact premise allowed for dizzyingly kinetic fight sequences that all but pinned you to your seat, the writer-director has continued to mine his boundless knowledge of the heroic bloodshed genre in order to fuse frenzied violence with themes of morality.

Havoc is an extension of his small yet combustible oeuvre. Set over the Christmas period, we find Tom Hardy’s Walker in the dim aisles of a convenience store, trying to scrape together a passable last-minute present for his six-year-old daughter. The actor is a master at playing wounded, war-beaten outliers and wears the role comfortably. Through flashback, we find Walker embroiled in a shady drug operation gone awry. In the present day, he’s tasked with tracking down Charlie (Justin Cornwell), whose disappearance after a...