‘The Furious’ Review: Ultra-Violent Action Epic More Than Lives Up to the Title
I’m sitting down to write this exactly two hours after witnessing Kenji Tanigaki’s pummeling beat ‘em up, The Furious… and I’m still sweating. With his latest, the filmmaker delivers a brutal, bloody, high-octane action film that consistently throws the viewer through a wall and asks, “Want some more?” My answer each time was a resounding “Hell yes”. It’s one of the best martial arts films that I’ve seen in years, and I couldn’t get enough of it.
Mysterious mute repairman, Wang Wei (Miao Xie), is distraught after his daughter, Rainy (Enyou Yang), is taken during a string of child kidnappings that have occurred around the city. In his mission to find her, he encounters Navin (Joe Taslim), a man searching for his wife, a journalist, who disappeared while investigating the missing children. Together, the two men will stop at nothing to find their loved ones, even if it means having to fight their way through an entire ring of child traffickers. The violent villains have no idea what’s about to come their way, because the pair of men are furious.
True to the title, Tanigaki’s latest taps into a contemporary rage felt around the world in the wake of the Epstein files. In dealing with child traffickers, the film makes no qualms about shining an unflinching light on the horrors happening to kids under the shadowy protection of wealthy men. Within seconds of its opening, we hear the screams of a tortured child, followed by a rescue attempt that becomes a dizzying display of hand-to-hand combat before reminding us that the good guys don’t always win. In The Furious, kids are beaten. They’re thrown through the air in garbage bags, nothing more than disposable to their kidnappers. Some even die. Thankfully, none of that reaches an unwatchable point of graphic gratuitousness, but it’s enough to make you want to curb-stomp the villains of the film yourself.
Enter Wang and Navin, two characters who channel that immense fury onto the screen. Following an edge-of-your-seat chase scene that left me breathless, Wang reports his daughter’s kidnapping to the police. The cops, of course, do nothing, and Wang is forced to leave, bare feet trailing bloody footprints behind him. Tanigaki consistently pokes at the pus-filled wound that is the worldwide justice system, one that constantly fails when it comes to holding those in power accountable. All that frustration—all that anger—comes pouring out through the magnetic performances of Xie and Taslim. Neither needs dialogue for us to understand the fury boiling in their blood. We sense it in their eyes. In the brutal sounds of their knuckles meeting flesh. There are so many close-ups of the two pouring sweat and screaming, it becomes reminiscent of a Dragon Ball Z episode (complimentary).
Beautifully choreographed and masterfully executed, each subsequent fight scene drags the audience further down into a new level of furious hell. Meteor Cheung’s frenetic camerawork throws us around like the various bodies flung across the screen. Sounds of bones breaking, flesh tearing, men shouting in agony, all creates an atmosphere that’s at once gruesome yet deeply satisfying. From cruel, hulking henchmen to shotgun-toting cowboys and sadistic psychopaths, all of them abusers of children, these are villains we yearn to see meet a bloody end. And you’d better believe The Furious delivers.
Locations grow increasingly seedy as our protagonists sink further into the disgusting world of child trafficking. We’re taken from the bustling streets of poor neighborhoods to a warehouse that feels like a setting straight out of Mortal Kombat, bodies encased in giant blocks of ice. These are places covered in grime; And dust; And blood. Finally culminating in a five-man battle royale amongst the gore-soaked walls of a police station during an explosive finale that’s equal parts The Raid: Redemption and Hard Boiled. Pure, violent chaos.
I cannot stress enough that even though the premise may follow a tried-and-true formula audiences will be all too familiar with, the action punches you so hard in the throat, you won’t even notice. Despite the gore and the brutality of it all, the performers move almost like dancers. As if we’re watching a bloody as hell ballet, tutus replaced by torn clothes drenched in the blood of bruised and battered men. There’s a little bit of everything here, whether it be vehicle stunts, one-on-one combat, or our heroes taking on entire hallways of goons, Oldboy style. The Furious pulls from the best of what has come before it to unleash one mean motherfucker of a martial arts film.
Intense. Bone-crushing. Wonderfully cathartic. The Furious captures an epic fury that people can actually get behind. We live in a time where we want justice and accountability for men like the villains at the center of the film, yet so rarely do we see it. Through the hard as bricks fists of Wang and Navin, Tanigaki gifts the audience the catharsis we need. This isn’t just one of the best martial arts films of the last decade…it’s a timely channeling of the people’s fury, packaged in a dizzying display of jaw-dropping fight scenes that hit with the power of a bulldozer.
See The Furious on the biggest, loudest screen you can when Lionsgate brings it to theaters June 12th to immerse yourself in one truly stunning martial arts action epic. Maybe bring a helmet just in case, though, because this film is one furious ride.
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The Furious
Summary
Thrilling, ultra-violent and masterful in execution, filmmaker Kenji Tanigaki delivers a pummeling action epic that more than lives up to its title.
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