The Furious Review

When Action is This Good, the Story Hardly Matters

By: Marc Kozak

The Furious

When Action is This Good, the Story Hardly Matters

By: Marc Kozak

If you’re really into martial arts action movies, you probably don’t need to read past this first paragraph: Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious is a raucous, blood-soaked thriller that features world-class fight choreography and jaw-dropping stunt work. Packed to the brim with meticulously coordinated fight scenes, this is pure adrenaline in cinematic form, the kind of movie where each brutal takedown is designed to elicit audible gasps and cheers from a packed theater audience.

Sounds pretty great, right? It’s certainly a tremendous athletic achievement, with actors and crew pulling off enough insane fighting sequences to guarantee that the movie will be forever mentioned in the same breath as hand-to-hand combat classics like The Raid and Dredd. It’s also true that even just watching The Furious is a bit of an athletic accomplishment in itself, as the audience is made to fight their way past a barrage of clunky dialogue, bizarre storytelling choices, and a pretty large suspension of disbelief. For many, it will be easy enough to ignore those kinds of pesky details, as they are really just minor annoyances that temporarily get in the way of what we truly want: more bonkers action scenes.

The story, such as it is, somehow requires four screenwriters to do a basic riff on the timeless template of mysterious and inexplicably skilled good guys heroically squaring off against almost comically despicable bad guys. There are dead wives to avenge and children in peril, classic action movie crutches to lean on in the absence of any real emotional stakes – otherwise it’d just be a bunch of dudes fighting! I say this partially in jest; this is what the genre is, for better or for worse, and The Furious isn’t interested in testing those limits.

The opening scene basically sets up everything we need to know – there is an evil organization kidnapping children off the streets and trafficking them to other evil people for truly terrible purposes. When we see a man in a leather mask with a ball gag in his mouth hovering over a screaming child in a dirty dungeon, we are immediately on board for someone to swoop in and wipe all of these bastards off the face of the planet.

" The actors and crew pull off enough insane fighting sequences to guarantee that the movie will be forever mentioned in the same breath as classics like The Raid and Dredd. "

We quickly transition to a scene of a regular working man living in a small home in the poorer side of town. The Man (Xie Miao) loves his young daughter, Rainy (Yang Enyou), who wants nothing more than to spend more time with her father, even if he is constantly nagging her to practice her fighting skills in order to protect herself in a cruel world. The unnamed father is a bit of a mystery himself, a mute who is living a quiet life away from his daughter’s mother, clearly hiding from some kind of unknown past traumas.

Rainy is obviously picked off by the trafficking ring and heaved into the back of a truck, leading to the first lengthy battle sequence in which The Man sprints through the streets and battles a series of thugs. The surprised kidnapping crew stumbles around bickering like the Three Stooges, only managing to hold off The Man thanks to the immense size and strength of one bald henchman (Brian Le), who becomes a bizarrely charming character thanks to his childlike motivations and hilariously indestructible body.

Right away, you can tell that director Tanigaki, fight choreographer Kensuke Sonomura, and cinematographer Meteor Cheung are all working in perfect sync, the camera flying in and around the truck as it speeds through the village streets, every blow and impact staged for maximum impact, the action graciously shown in large, unbroken chunks without utilizing too many cuts. Much of the fighting is done in very close quarters, as the actors use increasingly creative methods to create space for themselves, making each knockout feel like a joyous moment of release.

Our hero soon discovers that the gang hangs out in a seedy casino run by Mr. Song (Sahajak Boonthanakit), a grinning mob boss in a cowboy hat who we meet in the middle of a meeting with a potential buyer named Navin (Joe Taslim from The Raid and Sub-Zero in the recent Mortal Kombat movies). We know that Navin is actually undercover looking for clues about his missing wife, a reporter who had been investigating the traffickers, but it takes a while for The Man to catch on, and the two have one of those classic fights borne out of a misunderstanding before eventually teaming up to mow down tons of bad guys on their way out of the casino.

Our heroic duo, now on the hunt for The Man’s daughter and Navin’s wife, slowly work their way up the ladder of the criminal organization, taking out tons of bad guys and closing in on the whereabouts of their loved ones. We also meet the ultimate final boss, Paklung (Joey Iwanaga), a young, rich businessman with a pregnant wife, seemingly a soft-spoken family man until his dark secrets are revealed. Oh, and of course he is a master martial artist, as well.

This all sets up a quite frankly amazing climax, in which our two heroes face off against Paklung, the possibly immortal bald henchman, and Paklung’s archer assassin, Tak (The Raid’s Yayan Ruhian). It’s an instant classic of an ending, an epic five-way battle in which the fighters are constantly switching opponents depending on where their bodies are positioned at any given moment, the entire thing choreographed with the complexity and grace of a violent ballet. All five men are punched, kicked, headbutted, stabbed, shot, cut with swords, and/or knocked out with furniture at some point, but they just keep going, impervious to fatigue, pain, or seemingly death, locked in a breathless struggle where it feels like anything could happen. It’s an undeniable work of moviemaking magic, a jolt of lightning straight to the corpse of hundreds of other inferior action movies.

Would it have been nice to have less narrative cliches and a little more attention paid to the story (and to get someone to fix some of the embarrassingly bad ADR)? Sure, but that’s not really what Tanigaki and his team are interested in here. They set out to make a high-octane martial arts spectacle that gets people out of their seats, ready to fist pump or even run through a wall. In that regard, they’ve definitely succeeded and then some, rendering the meagre three-and-a-half-star rating on this review ultimately meaningless. You already know if this movie is for you – go check it out and have fun.