AI could never do what The Furious does. Although the whirling limbs and feats of strength are thrilling in themselves, what really makes Kenji Tanigaki’s pan-Asian action spectacle so awe-inspiring is the fact that everything you see is being done by human beings. Yes, humans can run that fast. We can jump that high and punch that hard and keep fighting at a ferocious pace for 15 minutes straight without collapsing from exhaustion. The performers that can do these things have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of their art, and the passion and dedication that it takes to sculpt a human body into a tough, yet agile martial-arts fighting machine are clearly visible in their work. An actual machine couldn’t replicate that if it tried.
Born in Japan, writer-director Tanigaki — also a respected stunt coordinator with dozens of credits — got his start as a member of Donnie Yen’s stunt team, which accounts both for his reverence for the art form and his international approach. Set in an unnamed country in Southeast Asia and performed largely in English, The Furious brings together martial-arts stars from China, Indonesia, and Thailand, as well as Japanese-American and Vietnamese-American fighters, combining each of their individual approaches into a veritable Olympics of ass kicking.
Some of these actors will be more familiar to mainstream American audiences than others: Star Joe Taslim played Sub-Zero in the 2021 Mortal Kombat remake, for example, while his co-lead Xie Miao is more famous in mainland China. Notable supporting players include Brian Le, who you may recognize as the pants-less security guard who fights Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Yayan Ruhian, best known as the villainous Mad Dog in The Raid (2011). (Ruhian also played Tasu Leech in The Force Awakens, for the Star Wars heads.) All of this is to say that, for action fans, The Furious is an all-star affair.
A pre-existing relationship with martial-arts movies also helps when it comes to appreciating The Furious on a plot level. The film’s action choreography builds on recent international hits like The Raid and The Night Comes for Us, with an emphasis on bone-crunching intensity and creative weaponry. But the characters and tropes reach further back to a simpler — some might say more cliché — era, and its black-and-white sense of morality can either be nostalgic or simplistic, depending on your point of view.
Wang Wei (Xie) is a classic reluctant hero, a Deaf handyman who’s busy raising his young daughter Rainy (Enyou Yang) as the story begins. We get the impression that there’s more to this quiet man than he lets on, but while Wang Wei tries to stay out of trouble, trouble always manages to find him. When Rainy is stolen off the street by a human-trafficking syndicate in broad daylight, Wang Wei teams up with Navin (Taslim), a journalist whose wife — played by Chocolate star Jeeja Yanin — has been captured by the same gang.
This puts both of them in the path of Paklung (Joey Iwanaga), the sociopathic son-in-law of a high-level gangster eager to prove that he’s ruthless enough to run the family business. Sealed in an immaculate white mansion surrounded by luxury, Paklung and his household are as distant from the source of their wealth as any other capitalists — except in this case, the money comes from kidnapping children for unspeakable purposes. The Furious is too broadly sketched to detail the specifics of the scheme: These are simply evil people who do evil things because they’re evil, which means that we don’t have to feel too bad about the excitement we get from watching their faces get smashed into jelly.
That’s the real point of a movie like this one, and The Furious delivers on that promise in a series of exhilarating action sequences — some of them clocking in at 15-plus minutes — that build with relentless forward momentum to a brutal climatic showdown. Along the way, we see kids in outrageous amounts of peril, bloody beatdowns in factories and police stations, two men holding back a warehouse’s worth of thugs using only a wooden palette and brute strength, a gunfight in a nightclub where dollar bills fall like rain, and a character return that produced audible hooting and applause at both of Inverse’s screenings of the film.
It’s an audacious, over-the-top celebration of the human body and its potential for violent athleticism, and if it doesn’t give you at least a little bit of a kick, you might want to check your pulse.
