Let’s clear this up: The Furious has nothing to do with The Fast and the Furious series, even though one actor appears in both. Nor does it have to do with the Vietnamese thriller Furie, which I reviewed in these pages. They need to dream up some more creative titles for these Southeast Asian martial-arts films, lest said films get lost at your multiplex. The Furious opens this week at a bunch of Tarrant County theaters, and if you’re in the mood for a near-insane The Raid-style martial-arts movie that moves at breakneck speed while breaking a lot of necks, here’s where to go.
Joe Taslim portrays an Indonesian undercover reporter named Navin whose wife (Jija Yanin) disappeared while investigating a child sex trafficking ring in the unnamed country where this takes place. When the traffickers kidnap a 10-year-old girl named Rainy (Yang Enyou), her mute Chinese father Wang Wei (Xie Miao) is determined to kill everybody in his path to get her back, and he has the kung fu skills to do it. The two men will have to team up, because the traffickers and their financial backer (Joey Iwanaga) have the police chief and half the city’s cops on their payroll.
Japanese director Kenji Tanigaki used to be a fight choreographer on some of the Rurouni Kenshin films and Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins. The only mildly surprising plot development that this movie’s four screenwriters come up with is the savage heel turn by the money man, a bespectacled guy who looks like he’s never thrown a punch in his life. Elsewhere, Wang Wei receives almost no backstory despite numerous references to some serious head injury he suffered. While the movie was shot in Thailand, Tanigaki makes precious little of the tropical environment because he’s so focused on the fight sequences.
But who am I kidding? You’re coming to this movie for the fight sequences (choreographed by Kensuke Sonomura), and this movie will spoil you with choices. Wang Wei ends up trapped in the octagon during an MMA event and takes down so many professional fighters and event security with his hammer that he winds up hitting his attackers while standing on top of a pile three men deep. Brian Le — surely you remember the bald security guard who impaled himself on the butt plug in Everything Everywhere All at Once — plays a henchman for the sex traffickers, and he stars in a memorable sequence where he fights both the protagonists at once, swinging a giant sledgehammer at them.
That fight is just a warm-up, though, for the climactic five-way fight in a police station when our two heroes square off against the two main villains, only for the bald henchman to intervene and decide to kill all four of them himself. (He participates in this fight after sustaining a head trauma that should have left his brain material outside his body. How impressive is that?) The villains include Yayan Ruhian as another killer working for the pedophiles who casually enters the station and starts killing the cops with a bow and arrow, and when Navin swings a ladder at him, he climbs the ladder so he can jump down on Navin from the top. The excess of The Furious’ violence is wretched and glorious. Try resisting it.
The Furious
Starring Xie Miao and Joe Taslim. Directed by Kenji Tanigaki. Written by Frank Hui, Lei Zhilong, Tin Shu Mak, and Kwan-Sin Shum. Rated R.
