While action fans are blessed to get good-to-great offerings on an annual basis, every so often, a movie will come around that rewrites the rules and sets a new standard for the genre. The Furious is one of those game-changers. It’s not just the best action movie of the year; it’s one of the best of the past several decades.
The premise is simple. Set in an unnamed Southeast Asian country, we follow Wang Wei (Xie Miao), a mute handyman spending time with his daughter Rainy (Yang Enyou) in her last few days of summer vacation before she returns home to China. However, Rainy is suddenly kidnapped by a child-trafficking ring. At the same time, journalist Navin (Joe Taslim) is searching for his wife Matia (Jeeja Yanin), who went missing investigating that exact same ring. With the police unwilling to do anything about the crime, the two men eventually cross paths and team up to save their loved ones by any means necessary.
The story isn’t groundbreaking by any means, but there’s enough of an emotional depth to the situation to be invested. Miao and Taslim have a solid chemistry, even if one of the characters can’t speak. The bad guys aren’t particularly deep. They’re just evil scumbags who kidnap and harm poor children; that’s all that matters. The only major fault in The Furious is the dialogue itself; the writing is already pretty clunky, and it’s only made worse by the awkward English dub. Having seen the film twice, the sound mix is improved from the premiere back at last year’s TIFF, but it is still pretty awkward.
But honestly, no one is coming to The Furious for a deep story. They’re here to see people hit each other in the face, and the film overdelivers in spades. Kenji Tanigaki–who made his name as a legendary action choreographer–directs each sequence to perfection. Each action sequence builds off the previous one in a notable way, taking full advantage of the different settings and making each fight move differently. One early setpiece taking place inside an underground fight club sees Miao wrecking people with a hammer, stacking them into a literal mountain of bodies.
“The Furious is one of those game-changers.”
Kensuke Konomura’s choreography in The Furious feels like an evolution of his style, choreographing the Baby Assassins films. He blends together savagery and strategy, as each fight feels like both a desperate attempt to survive while trying to read out their opponent in hopes of getting the upper hand for even a fleeting moment. It helps that each of the film’s main characters—all played by a multinational who’s who of martial arts all-stars–have all wildly different fighting styles, making each clash feel distinct from one another. For instance, the first meeting between allies Wang and Navin is essentially the action equivalent of a meet-cute, where Miao’s strike-focused kung fu faces Taslim’s grapple-heavy judo technique.
The stylistic difference extends to the baddies as main villains Pak Lung (Joey Iwanaga) and Tak (Yayan Ruhian) employ a blend of karate/taekwondo and a modified version of pencak silat, respectively. And then there’s HD. Played by Brian Le, the hulking enforcer is the biggest scene-stealer in a film entirely composed of scene stealers. There’s no way a man Le’s size should fight with the speed and ferocity with which he does, and yet every fight sequence you’re just left in awe.
There’s so much constant action that it threatens to be exhausting before the film ends, but it turns out that those scenes were appetizers to the film’s main course. Without a hint of exaggeration, I can say that the film’s final setpiece–a brutal five-person brawl inside a police station–is one of the greatest displays of cinematic violence ever put to screen. It flows seamlessly between one-on-ones, two-on-ones, two-on-twos, and even two-on-two-on-one, all while these bodies are each other through hell. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
There’s even a Raid rematch between alums Taslim and Ruhian, where ladders are just as deadly as a bow and arrow.
To put it simply: The Furious is an instant masterpiece. For every single instance you think you’ve seen the human body move and fight, The Furious shows you at least three new ways every couple of minutes. Yes, the story is basic, but the action within it is downright revolutionary. I can’t wait to see it again at least a dozen more times.
