Review: The Furious

Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious doesn’t so much tell a story as it hurls one at your head. It arrives swinging, kicking, crashing through tables, and rarely pauses long enough to catch its breath. Child traffickers kidnap the daughter of a mute laborer. A journalist disappears while investigating the same criminal network. Two men collide, exchange punches, discover they want the same thing, and spend the next ninety minutes reducing an army of villains to broken bones and bloodstains.

That’s the movie.

And honestly, that’s enough.

For years, action fans have lamented the disappearance of the mid-budget martial arts showcase, the kind of film that lives or dies on choreography rather than mythology, universe-building, or CGI spectacle. The Furious feels like a direct response to that complaint. Directed by longtime Donnie Yen collaborator Kenji Tanigaki and featuring performers from across Asia’s action cinema landscape, the film embraces a simple philosophy: if people stop fighting, something has gone wrong.

The plot is little more than connective tissue. Xie Miao plays a mute father whose daughter is abducted by a child trafficking ring operating somewhere in Southeast Asia. Joe Taslim plays Navin, a man searching for his missing wife, a journalist who vanished while exposing the same criminal enterprise. Their paths cross, fists fly, and an uneasy alliance forms as they work their way up a hierarchy of gangsters, corrupt police officers, and wealthy predators.

The villains are sketched with the broad confidence of old-school pulp. One glance tells you everything you need to know. There’s a hulking brute who seems incapable of feeling physical pain but deeply wounded by emotional embarrassment. There’s Yayan Ruhian, looking like an evil version of Legolas who wandered out of a Wes Anderson movie. There are wealthy kingpins, crooked officials, and a final boss whose transformation from businessman to human wrecking ball is one of the film’s great pleasures.

Nobody exists to deliver nuance. They exist to create memorable silhouettes and die spectacular deaths.

What elevates The Furious above countless revenge thrillers is the sheer inventiveness of its action design. Tanigaki approaches combat less like a fight choreographer and more like a dancer. Bodies twist, leap, tumble, and collide with an almost musical rhythm. Characters use every available object as a weapon. Bicycles become instruments of destruction. Hammers change hands like relay batons. Chairs, tables, bottles, and sledgehammers all enter the rotation.

One extended sequence built around control of a hammer becomes an escalating masterclass in physical storytelling. Another fight sees a giant opponent using another human being as a broom to sweep away attackers. A barefoot chase through broken glass feels agonizingly tactile. Every impact lands with satisfying weight.

Most impressive is the clarity. Modern action cinema often mistakes chaos for excitement. Here, Tanigaki and cinematographer Meteor Cheung maintain remarkable visual coherence even during massive brawls involving multiple combatants. A late sequence in a police station evolves into a five-man free-for-all that should be incomprehensible, yet every movement remains readable. You always know where everyone is and what they’re trying to accomplish.

That clarity makes the film’s best moments unforgettable. Not necessarily the bloodiest kills, but the little bits of athletic brilliance. A fighter slipping between two closing tables and gliding back underneath them in one continuous motion sticks in the memory longer than any decapitation.

The film isn’t flawless. The dialogue scenes are functional at best and bizarre at worst. English-language exchanges often feel strangely detached from the actors delivering them. Whether the result of dubbing, post-production manipulation, or something more technologically dubious, the effect is distracting. Whenever characters stop fighting and start talking, the movie briefly loses its rhythm.

Fortunately, those interruptions are short-lived.

Like The Raid, The Night Comes for Us, and other modern martial arts standouts, The Furious understands that action itself can be the point. It doesn’t pretend to offer profound insight into human nature. It offers the fantasy that monstrous people can be held accountable through force, determination, and an endless supply of roundhouse kicks.

It is violent, ridiculous, frequently absurd, and enormously entertaining. The story barely matters. The dialogue barely matters. What matters is movement: bodies in motion, fists flying, bones cracking, villains falling.

On that level, The Furious is an elemental success. A crowd-pleasing, bone-crunching celebration of cinematic ass-kicking that rarely misses a beat and never forgets why you bought a ticket in the first place.

4/5