Because cinema is an artform defined by duration and, thus, its unique ability to depict movement, capturing human bodies in motion has always been one of the purest delights of the movies — and one not contained to a single genre. It’s old hat by now to compare a martial arts film to ballet or link Jackie Chan to Buster Keaton — an influence explicitly explored in Chan’s work — but it’s basically true that action films, like musicals, stunt-filled silent comedy, concert films, and filmed sports, can show us talented performers moving in astonishing ways, the confluence of choreography and committed physical performance producing a thrilling jolt in the mind of the audience. Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious, a pan-Asian ass-beating extravaganza, is the latest peak of this kind of filmmaking, filled with the sort of hard-hitting, intricately conceived hand-to-hand combat that characterized films like The Raid or The Night Comes for Us. Breathlessly received throughout its festival run, it is the kind of film that inspires “best action movie of the decade”-style hyperbole. And why resist? The Furious is awesome.
Though Tanigaki has previously directed a couple films of his own, like the Donnie Yen-in-a-fat-suit comedy Enter the Fat Dragon, his work here is better anticipated by his career as stunt coordinator and action director on films like SPL or Soi Cheang’s sublime Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In. He’s enlisted Kensuke Sonomura, the action director behind the Baby Assassins films, to perform those duties here, and Sonomura’s distinctive style, which involves a great deal of sliding on the ground and unpredictable changes in rhythm, shines through at a scale much larger than his previous work. Both Tanigaki and Sonomura are filmmakers with long resumes stretching back over 20 years, and The Furious feels like a cumulative breakout, the results of several decades worth of craft-honing thrown up on screen with abandon. They have assembled a super team of martial arts talent to achieve a lifetime’s worth of pugilistic ideas.
Xie Miao stars as the mute Wang Wei, a mysterious man who turns out to be extraordinarily good at kung fu when his daughter (Yang Enyou) is kidnapped by thugs from a child trafficking ring. In trying to rescue her, he encounters Joe Taslim’s Navin, who is similarly on the gang’s trail after the disappearance of his journalist wife (Jeeja Yanin). They team up and take on hordes of bad guys for about two hours, highlighted by boss battles with the likes of Brian Le, Joey Iwanaga, and the always great Yayan Ruhian, who turns in some of his most menacing work here.
A clean, unfussy plot that admittedly relies on grim cliche — seriously, there are too many action movies about human trafficking — mostly serves as an engine to keep the fights coming, and those scenes have a tremendous sense of escalation, not only from one to another but within each discrete set piece. One fight could start as a facemelting two-on-two brawl before a fifth combatant arrives to take on everyone. Another melee ascends to a higher level with the introduction of a motorcycle. The Furious is possessed by an unpredictable energy that is constantly invigorating. If you’ve seen enough martial arts films, it’s easy to feel like you’ve seen all the ways a man can punch or kick another man and yet Tanigaki and Sonomura seem to invent new ways for the human body to move in every scene.
Despite the serious material and brutal action, The Furious is separated from many of its peers by its playful sense of humor. The line between violence and slapstick is often wonderfully thin, and the fight scenes are injected with enough levity that the action never becomes oppressive. In fact, the mix of comedy and ultraviolence recalls the wild tone of Category III films from Hong Kong cinema’s heyday. Brian Le, who apparently took inspiration from the behavior of angry babies, is especially funny, as his gigantic bruiser character is both the most physically imposing person in the film and its goofiest creation.
Still, it’s not as though The Furious is without flaw. Character and dialogue are perfunctory concerns here and it shows, especially as the film is presented almost entirely in English with most of the actors being dubbed over with ill-fitting voice performances that do the already poor script no favors. And on the rare occasion that the film stops its momentum in order to set up its next brawl, this can be a particularly unwelcome distraction. But this gripe — and any others that viewers might muster — are minor in the face of what is otherwise an absolute standout achievement in action filmmaking.
DIRECTOR: Kenji Tanigaki; CAST: Xie Miao, Joe Taslim, Yang Enyou, Yayan Ruhian, JeeJa Yanin, Brian Le; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate; IN THEATERS: June 12; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 53 min.
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