In The Furious, mute handyman Wei (Xie Miao) has his daughter taken by child traffickers. He teams up with the driven Navim (Joe Taslim), the husband of a journalist who was captured by the same group of degenerates while conducting an investigation. Together, these two warriors hack and slash their way through Southeast Asia using both brains and brawn (mostly brawn, mind you), stopping at nothing to find their loved ones, or even to catch a breath. Apt title.
The Furious sets a new benchmark for on-screen martial arts, finding a hypnotic rhythm via trailblazing camerawork that becomes part of the choreography itself and stunts that almost certainly sent a few crew members to the hospital. The frequently over-the-top fisticuffs blend Wing Chun, Silat, Judo throws, and other MMA techniques while making ingenious use of the surroundings, whether it’s a brawl inside a freezer packed with giant slabs of ice or an early confrontation atop the slippery, unstable bed of a garbage truck. And when the Muay Thai fighters fighting in a nightclub stop to throw down with the heroes in a sequence that feels ripped straight out of Sifu, or when the camera locks onto the furrowed brow of all five of its combatants and displays them all at once in a split-screen collage, it’s downright blissful.
So why the three-and-a-half stars on Letterboxd? Well, director Kenji Tanigaki may have made a film that truly excels at mano-a-mano, but that’s also the only thing it’s good at. I’d be lying if I said The Furious totally lived up to the hype for me; if the fights are a showcase for finesse and flair, the pesky screenplay is the opposite.
Nearly everything involving the police subplot, for example, is ludicrous. It might be a fitting parallel for the Epstein Files, but as a plot device, it’s genuinely infuriating to watch the captain successfully gaslight both his squad and an angry mob while trafficked children are literally rappelling down a building right in front of them. At its best, The Furious is a breakneck rush, but at its worst, the film pairs goofy action beats with equally goofy machinations on the page. See the scene in which Wei and Navim block a hallway of aggressive attackers with a pallet for the former (good thing there isn’t any space between the boards, unlike every other pallet ever constructed), or the baddies wiping out an entire police squad without so much as breaking a sweat for the latter.
I also think that no regard at all for the limits of the human body is deflating after a while. If an ordinary guy can take a sledgehammer flush to the head and keep swinging, why should I expect the next 137 blows to matter? Like the last John Wick, things start to tip from action into pure performance art by the end, which looks cool but sacrifices suspense. At a certain point, no one is better or more distinctive than anyone else, so you can’t help but become dimly aware that you’re no longer watching a “fight.”
I don’t mean to sound too negative—overall, The Furious is a blast. But despite reaching some higher highs, this is on a shelf below classics like The Raid 2 and The Night Comes for Us. I do expect it’d kill in small doses, though. It’s gonna make one hell of a YouTube compilation. 6-13-26
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