1 of 5 | Top to bottom, Joey Iwanaga, Joe Taslim and Yayan Ruhian pile up in “The Furious,” in theaters Friday. Photo courtesy of Lionsgate
The Furious, in theaters Friday, brings a new vision to martial arts movies. Established martial artists converge to bring something unique to the screen, while still satisfying in the kicking department.
Matia (JeeJa Yanin) investigates a child kidnapping ring after calling her husband, Navin (Joe Taslim) on the phone. She is unable to rescue the children, so when Wang Wei’s (Xie Miao) daughter, Rainy (Yang Enyou) is kidnapped, he comes looking.
Wang interrupts Navin’s investigation of Matia’s disappearance, so they team up to find Matia and Rainy.
Taslim is an Indonesian martial artist from The Raid and The Night Comes For Us, who parlayed that into roles in Mortal Kombat and The Fast and the Furious 6. Xie is a Hong Kong martial artist who began his career as a child actor playing Jet Li’s son.
Yanin came out of retirement for this role after her brief but impressive Thai movie career. Her first fight scene establishes how director Kenji Tanigaki and action director Kensuke Sonomura can craft new forms of combat between veteran fighters.
Matia uses her three attackers to propel herself across the floor. The Furious combat is as much about manipulating each other’s bodies as it is striking, as in when attackers pull Matia into a split, which she uses as leverage to flip herself.
A big bald henchman (Brian Le) gorilla walks sideways. Often the upper and lower bodies are doing different things. When people get knocked on the ground, they keep moving with their hands.
Wang is so relentless, running Tom Cruise style after the truck that took Rainy, it takes a hit and run to temporarily halt his pursuit.
Sequences build and compound. For example, in a MMA ring, one villain attacks Wang with bottles. He smashes them, making the barefoot fighters cut their feet. Then he climbs a pile of attackers to get out.
When one bad guy falls, another will just lift Wang over the downed man to continue, so Wang also steps over him while kicking back. Often Wang or Nasim will kick someone into position for the next kick.
Found weapons are heavy and unwieldy. There is a sequence with a ladder, which Jackie Chan once used for comic effect, but it is no joke in The Furious.
There are some disturbing deaths of innocent characters, which ought not be surprising given the child trafficking plot. It reinforces that these kidnappers need to be stopped.
When there is dialogue, The Furious is mostly in English. Wang is mute from a head injury, so he does not talk. Rainy speaks a Chinese dialect with English subtitles.
It is said to take place “somewhere in Southeast Asia” though filmed in Thailand. Rainy is from China, which Wang has left.
This makes it vague enough not to offend any specific province, but still familiar to connoisseurs of Asian cinema.
There have been decades of martial arts movies with innovations usually coming from new styles from different regions. The Furious found new choreography using the tools established by several of those artists.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
