Child gets kidnapped. Their mysterious badass father/father figure goes on a rip-roaring rampage to rescue them. We’ve seen plenty of these movies over the decades. But Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious is the first since 2014’s John Wick or even 2010’s The Man From Nowhere to find new ways to perfectly balance some excessively absurd yet melodramatic stakes with the primal, smooth brain enjoyment of watching people fuck each other up in ridiculously athletic ways.
The craziness is set right off the jump: A female journalist, Matia (Jeeja Yanin), is infiltrating a child trafficking syndicate and gets captured, but not before she kicks the shit out of six guys. The action is kinetic, the choreography rife with scorpion kicks and ridiculous grapples, and Matrix-esque athleticism that feels bone-crunchingly real as it’s all captured on camera across several unbroken long takes. Tanigaki isn’t fucking around with The Furious. This feels like he looked at The Raid and said, ‘Let me show you how it’s really done.’
That opening sequence is immediately followed by the introduction of Wang (Xie Miao), a mysterious mute handyman, and the subsequent kidnapping of his daughter by the aforementioned child trafficking syndicate. I can’t speak much for the clumsy plotting, other than that it works in a perfectly serviceable way. But whatever qualms there are get quickly erased when Wang gets absolutely clocked by a truck as he’s trying to rescue his daughter, walks it off, sticks his limbs in some ice water, and is ready to go harder than ever in the next scene. The Furious always takes a moment here and there to remind you what kind of movie it is.
There’s also an unexpected timely quality to the narrative scaffolding tying all of The Furious’ action set pieces together. Tanigaki doesn’t have anything sophisticated to say about child trafficking other than ‘this is bad’ and ‘journalism is good.’ That’s perfectly okay! When the worrying normalisation of pedophilia (especially in ‘Murica), decline of journalistic standards, and overall moral decay are becoming ever more prevalent, watching child traffickers get their faces punched in repeatedly feels oh so good.
But I digress a bit here. The Furious is ultimately about the action and fights, and boy are we spoiled rotten.
As Wang infiltrates a nightclub run by the child trafficking syndicate, he inadvertently crosses paths with Navin (Joe Taslim), Matia’s husband and a journalist trying to figure out what happened to his wife. Once all the pieces are on the board, The Furious powers through the remaining 90 minutes with such skill and energy that it’s not a stretch to say that this movie is a frontrunner for the title of greatest action flick of the 2020s.
Please read the rest of my review here as the rest is too unwieldy to copy + paste: https://panoramafilmthoughts.substack.com/p/the-furious
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