What’s It About

After Wang Wei’s daughter is kidnapped by a criminal network, his only ally is Navin, a journalist whose wife has mysteriously disappeared. Fueled by a furious vengeance, the unlikely duo finds themselves in an explosive martial-arts showdown against a relentless gang of thugs.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

There are moments in cinema when you forget to breathe. Not because the story grabbed you by the throat, but because the images on screen are moving so fast, so precisely, and with such raw physical force that your body simply stops cooperating. The Furious is that kind of movie. Directed by Kenji Tanigaki, a decorated Japanese stuntman who became the first Japanese member of the Hong Kong Stuntman Association, this film announces itself in the first five minutes and never once lets go. This story starts off with Wang Wei (Xie Miao), an Asian martial artist who takes care of his daughter, Rainy, living in an Asian country. Because of a head injury, he cannot talk and communicates with Rainy using Chinese sign language and writing notes. He teaches her kung fu every day, but she doesn’t want to learn. Instead of being a fighter, she wants to be beautiful. The father wants her to be ready for an unsafe world; you can see in their relationship how parents and children fight quietly and need to be able to see each other. But one day, when Rainy is taken in broad daylight off the street by multiple men as part of a child trafficking operation, Wang tries to find her and runs through the streets barefoot and in flip-flops until he gets to the place where he thinks she was taken. You know right there how serious this father is. This is where we meet Navin, played by Joe Taslim from the film The Raid 2, who is a journalist chasing after a very different criminal network than Wong’s. His wife has been missing. Wong’s shock and sorrow are fresh and violent, while Navin’s has become a slow-burning rage due to years of dead ends and heartaches. As they meet each other for the first time at a nightclub filled with chaos, the movie shifts into another level of frenzy and remains there until the end. Tanigaki builds his fight sequences the way a conductor builds a symphony. The choreography was developed alongside Japanese fight designer Kensuke Sonomura, and together they assembled a cast of international martial artists who each bring an entirely distinct physical language. Xie Miao moves with gymnastic fluidity, launching his body across crowds of attackers with the elasticity of a man who has been training since childhood, and he has, having starred opposite Jet Li as a child action star in the 1990s. Taslim fights like a machine: disciplined, efficient, devastatingly direct. Brian Le is the towering enforcer Ho, who uses his body to destroy anything that gets in his way by using the force of a wrecking ball. And then there’s Yayan Ruhian, who uses an incredible bow and arrow to shoot with deadly accuracy in his bright red jogging outfit; when we see him, we feel like everything we see will be permanent once we leave the theater! What separates Tanigaki’s direction from most action filmmaking today is his refusal to hide behind editing. These sequences develop in long, wide takes, with Meteor Cheung’s camera circling the action to capture choreography in full. There are no quick cuts to disguise a missed mark or a shaky performer. When Wang drives a man’s head through a wall, you see it happen, entirely, in real time. The pressure this places on every performer is immense, and every single one of them rises to meet it. They have to. There is nowhere to hide. The setting adds to the film by becoming another character. From the UFC Octagon to the meat-packing plant, to the high-rise office building, all the locations are reimagined as a backdrop to the improvised violence of the film. Hammers, wooden pallets, screwdrivers, ladders, broken glass, and office chairs are all used as weapons of destruction. Unlike the cleanly choreographed, elegant fight scenes of Hong Kong’s wire-fu films, or the gun-fest of American action movies, The Furious contains the erratic pacing of The Raid, the ingenuity of Jackie Chan in his earliest days, and a brutality that is uniquely its own. As a result, the movie comes with significant weightiness and the challenges associated with it. The main villains in this movie are far from the world of cartoonish characters. As evidenced by the child-trafficking ring that forms the basis for the film, the movie not only does not shy away from addressing the severity of that subject matter, but also expresses the consequences of that world through extreme acts of violence toward people who should have been safe. One scene that produced perhaps the loudest collective gasp from an audience sitting in a packed theater helped the film achieve realistic reactions because real lives are impacted significantly through the consequences of the movie. The Furious stumbles slightly in its dialogue scenes. Probably because four screenwriters share credit, and it shows. Transitions between action sequences are occasionally clumsy, and certain lines of dubbed English carry an awkward quality. The film is also deliberately vague about its characters’ backgrounds, how Wang lost his voice, and where he learned to fight, leaving these questions open, although unnecessary, just thought I would let you know. The third act of the film? It’s absolutely epic. There are tons of fighters in many different places doing combinations that change the nature of who is working with who and copying the styles of one another, and every time they escalate things to an even higher level than they already had, just when you think that’s all there is to see, they do it again. The end of the movie is worth every split second of its run time. The Furious, in my opinion, is part of the conversation about The Raid, RRR, and The Night Comes for Us as proof that the most exciting films are made beyond Hollywood, and Kenji Tanigaki has created a multi-national cast of fighters to take action films to the next level, one hit at a time. Watch this movie loud, watch this movie with a group of people, and hang on!

OUR RATING – A VENGEFUL 9