The Furious
Visceral, fast-moving and filled to the edges with balletic choreography, Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious is almost everything you could want from a kung fu movie, even if it’s not quite all that you would want from a film. Like most films in the genre, a lot of the focus and ingenuity is focused on that level without enough interest to dig deeper, which is not necessarily a problem just a reality of the genre. The Furious has been touted as the greatest new action epic since The Raid. It is not entirely up to that level of comparison; there is considerably less going on under the hood once you get past the high-wire theatrics and stunt work, but it is the kind of action film we periodically need to remind us why we love the genre in the first place.
When Wang Wei (Miao), a mute Chinese national with a mysterious past and formidable kung fu skills, sees his daughter kidnapped by a group of street thugs, he launches a one-man rampage through a shadowy Southeast Asian underworld to find her and bring her home. Plowing his way through an increasingly stylized assortment of memorable goons, many of whom could easily have been Street Fighter opponents, he uncovers a deeper well of corruption built around exploiting the children of the area, stealing them from their parents and selling them into sexual slavery. Along the way he runs into former police offer Navin (Taslim) looking for the same answers he is. Together they join forces to destroy the children smuggling ring and find some measure of revenge, even as the violence destroys everyone around them.
As he picks up nearly as many allies as enemies, Wang Wei continues charging headlong into one brutal confrontation after another, each one providing a new reason for Tanigaki and his team to unleash truly incredible fight choreography. A little bit of Death Wish, a fair amount of Assault on Precinct 13, and a whole lot of Bruce Lee and Donnie Yen, The Furious stakes out solid ground for itself as a modern martial arts showcase. In that sense, it is among the purest of modern kung fu films: deeply sentimental, almost entirely without irony, and willing to embrace both the best and worst habits of the genre. At the same time it’s impossible not to wish some of the creativity on display in the action couldn’t have been extended to the story itself. Though serious and frequently tragic The Furious is one-note enough that it becomes difficult to feel much for the characters’ successes or defeats. They are caricatures more than humans; machines built to put on a kung fu show, which they do extremely well, but not extensive drama. Tanigaki seems to know this, throwing in a new fight scene every five seconds or so just to keep us distracted. The Furious is a mile wide, but only an inch deep.
Tanigaki’s background as an action director and choreographer is visible from the very beginning, as The Furious opens with hard-hitting, acrobatic kung fu sequences that are thrilling, hilarious, and unbelievable all at once. And yet somehow it continues upping the ante, moving through an underground fighting pit, a strange ice house where the villain’s enemies are frozen to death, and eventually into the bowels of a secret prison. Tanigaki is keenly aware of both the limits of his actors and stunt performers and the possibilities of his surroundings, and he uses everything to maximum effect and then some. There is nothing too far, no limit he will not push past, giving The Furious a sense of the absurd that wouldn’t be out of place in Jackie Chan’s work and yet doesn’t feel derivative or out of place.
And maybe that’s enough to keep its deficiencies at bay. By the time we get to the final battle, with five different combatants all fighting one another for different reasons and from different backgrounds, all that remains is the rhythm of the moment. The thinness of the story has largely fallen away. Does it yank you out of the movie sometimes when there is a particularly bad line reading, or when people survive being hit full force in the head with a sledgehammer, thrown out of four-story windows, or hit by cars, only to get back up and keep running? It can, but at the same time, that is what The Furious is here for: a headlong rush of adrenaline that carries you from beginning to end.
7 out of 10
Starring Xie Mao, Joe Taslim, Yang Enyou, Brian Le and Yayan Ruhian. Directed by Kenji Tanigaki.