A mute handyman and the husband of a missing journalist take down a child trafficking ring in The Furious, the biggest, absolutely insane, and utterly wowing action spectacular. Yes, it holds up to everything you’ve heard.
Finally, The Furious is upon us! After appearing in two of our Festival Previews (for Overlook & SIFF), we’ve finally seen it now that it’s in wide release!
Trying to explain the Furious is nearly a useless task. It’s hard to take the astounding, high-flying, pulse-pounding, mind-blowing action and put it into words. Well, more of distilling the feelings of wowing elation into a few hundred words of text. The Furious is a film that needs to be experienced. Coming in, I heard about it; read about it; listened as friends raved after the SIFF midnight show I was too tired to stay for (now that I’ve seen it, the sheer adrenaline of the film would keep me awake. I regret not attending now, to see this film in a massive crowd, rather than the mostly empty afternoon showing). I thought I was ready. I was not. It was everything I had expected and more. So much more. Not since The Raid movies has action been this over-the-top entertaining, spectacularly designed, and flawlessly performed. Kenji Tanigaki, the director of The Furious, has a 30-year career as a fight choreographer and stuntman, and a lifetime of martial arts experience. Everything he’s done has been mixed and distilled into something turned up to 11, not unlike Chad Stahelski and David Leitch turning their specific experiences into the John Wick films.
Four writers: Tin Chu Mak, Zhilong Lei, Kwan-sin Shum, and Frank Hui craft the scenario to set up the expert action experience. In the vague “Somewhere in South East Asia,” (this credit both keeps from damning a specific country’s government and also notes to the pan-Asian cast and crew), Wang Wei, played with driving intensity by Miao Xie, is a mute, widowed Chinese handyman, raising his pre-teen daughter Rainy. She gets kidnapped by traffickers, whose connection goes high and deep into society, allowing a continuing series of villains and henchmen heading up the chain. He meets with Navin, played by modern martial arts superstar Joe Taslim (recently seen by US audiences as Sub-Zero in the new Mortal Kombat films), the husband of a missing journalist trying to expose the chain and find his wife. It’s only together with their specialized sets of skills that they are able to make the progress needed to rescue Rainy and the other children.
The use of child trafficking and other crimes as a basis is a double-edged sword. It’s a heavy subject to deal with, giving the film weight, more than a basic “take down a crime lord” plot. It’s one that just infuriates me and boils my blood that it happens. That people are that cruel to one another, lacking empathy. It does make it easy to cheer their bodies rent and destroyed. But sometimes a terrible subject clashes against the tone of the OH THAT WAS COOL, and, this is on me, the strong “fuck these guys” feelings pulled from the film playing. There are a lot of comic moments in the gory battles, almost feeling like Looney Tunes in the way people move. Almost as it’s weird to connect such over-the-top with the nasty implications of the real-world crime.
Not only does everything fly: fists, feet (in flip-flops for a while), knives, guns, arrows, and so much more of environmental weapons in use as countless people head into one another with tenaciously furious violence and a variety of fighting styles, but so does the camera. The choreography, with Kensuke Sonomura credited as “action director” of the battles, is astounding enough, moving in a continually slightly speed-ramped quickness. But the cinematography, by Meteor Chung, takes it up more, becoming as much of a kinetic, frantic character, sliding around and through, working in tandem with the bodies moving on screen. No matter where or how (and I’m not giving away any of the set-ups on purpose), it never stops moving, with the film building and building to a fever pitch. Chris Tonick edits with precision, flowing from shot to shot. With the building, highly active action, it must have been a major challenge to keep a solid, matching beat, and Tonick slays!
It’s a film that hits, and hits hard. It’s brutal, it’s tough, but never stops; each blow has an impact; nothing light about it at all. All kicks, punches, slices, jabs, and whatever else is used for the cacophony of perfectly planned and executed violence are felt. Each sequence is truly magnificent, building on the last, where an hour in, I thought, “this cannot get wilder and more insane.” But it did. It did for another hour! Without giving any of the details that lead to it, who is involved, and why, but holy shit the 5-way melee that takes up the final 20-ish minutes is.. Wow. When the credits rolled, I was exhausted but enthralled, continually taken to yet another level.
The Furious not only meets the expectations of the hype but goes above and beyond. Kenji Tanigaki’s film is a high-octane, over-the-top, brutal ride of action spectacle. It’s an experience of the highest order, with impressive and clever action sequences connected with kinetic camera movement and smooth editing. Hit the theatre and let The Furious kick you in the face for two hours!