Kenji Tanigaki’s “The Furious” arrives with barely-there plot mechanics and clunkily dubbed dialogue across multiple languages. It’s a film that doesn’t try to win you over with story—just with an astonishing, tightly choreographed bloodbath of hand-to-hand co
A truck bed becomes a battlefield and, for a while, nothing else really matters—certainly not the dialogue that struggles to keep up. In “The Furious,” directed by Kenji Tanigaki, the screenwriting credits list a quartet of writers, but the choreography does the heavy lifting.
If you’ve ever doubted the adage that two heads—or indeed four—are better than one. this is your validation. just not in the way you’d expect. Nobody could accuse the credited scribes of working overtime on the film’s barely-there plot and barely-care dialogue. What they don’t provide. action choreographer Kensuke Sonomura supplies in overwhelming quantities: brute hand-to-hand combat. highly resourceful weaponry. and gnarly bodily contortions that land with the confidence of a team that has practiced every grimace. every impact. and every collision.
Tanigaki directs a martial arts spectacle that feels built to be watched in bursts—where applause arrives mid-film after especially vigorous action setpieces. and laughter catches whenever the construction turns absurd. It also targets a broader audience. This culture-blending Hong Kong production was scooped up for international distribution by Lionsgate after a noisy fall festival run that saw it come second in the People’s Choice voting in Toronto’s Midnight Madness section. The result is a crowdpleaser built for crossover cult momentum, with a global opening scheduled for tomorrow.
A good portion of the dialogue is in clunkily dubbed English. Mandarin, Thai, and Tagalog also feature, but the language mix doesn’t exactly smooth the experience. What the film does offer is momentum that doesn’t wait for polish. You come for the fighting, and once the choreography starts paying off, it’s hard to feel shortchanged.
Chinese martial artist and erstwhile child star Xie Miao stands out in an ensemble the movie isn’t overly interested in deepening. He plays a blue-collar worker—nameless. as are many of the story’s other anchors—stationed in an unnamed country billed onscreen only as “somewhere in Southeast Asia.” The setup is straightforward and grim: child traffickers run riot. and a corrupt police force doesn’t much care.
The threat lands personally when our hero’s nine-year-old daughter, Rainy, played by Yang Enyou, arrives from their native China. She’s swiftly poached by a band of criminals. The film frames them as something worse than traffickers—they don’t just traffic children; they extensively torture them. After a lurid prologue establishes what that means, Rainy is tossed in the back of a truck.
Then comes the first big reminder that “The Furious” isn’t going to slow down for emotional nuance. Her father is a man with a very particular set of skills. including maintaining a staggering sprint speed while chasing that truck—still in sandals. That strange. witty detail becomes part of the film’s signature texture as the chase unfolds into a centerpiece fight scene. A relentless. momentum-shifting knockdown “barney” plays out on the open bed of the moving vehicle. and it’s the kind of execution that feels designed to keep you leaning forward.
He’s eventually thrown off, but the film refuses to end there. Backup arrives in the form of Navin, played by Joe Taslim, described here as a lone wolf. Navin’s backstory ties into the wider horror of the plot: his journalist wife has gone missing while investigating the same psychotic syndicate. Team work becomes the film’s most effective tool. and it’s visible on screen—the pair forms a formidable. physically complementary combination.
As they track down the kidnappers to their industrial lair, the surprises arrive through impact, not plot turns. The surprises are all in the bone-snapping, back-bending, and sometimes literally eye-popping practical execution. Props, too, matter throughout. Ladders. hammers. and wooden pallets are creatively deployed to keep the fights moving. and when the bloodied. exhausted combatants run out of ideas. they start throwing bicycles at each other.
Some weapons are more conventional than others, but the film gives them its own intimidation. An archery set appears as a more conventional instrument of death. yet it’s wielded with eerie poise by a diminutive villain played by Yayan Ruhian. Much of the casting nods to genre aspirations. and for viewers who’ve followed the world of brutal martial arts movies. the comparisons come quickly—Ruhian is also associated with “The Raid. ” and Joe Taslim is connected here as well. described through his work in “The Raid” and the recent “Mortal Kombat” films. The ensemble feels pulled from familiar gravity wells.
Underneath the mayhem, the human body remains the chief weapon. The action doesn’t chase the gravity-defying elegance associated with “Crouching Tiger. Hidden Dragon. ” and while “The Furious” shares a producer in Bill Kong. it doesn’t share that style. Instead, it aims for a visceral crunch—flesh on flesh, and sometimes flesh on concrete.
The film doesn’t pretend its fights are realistic. Fighters mass, swarm, and fill space in unlikely configurations. Still, it has an angular, tactile physicality that sticks. Limbs jut and thrust at awkward, palpably painful angles; one man’s back becomes another man’s brace. It may be shot. cut. and scored in slick. expected fashion—Meteor Cheung’s lensing provides an oily chemical radiance. while grinding guitars back up the carnage—but “The Furious” doesn’t move quite like anything else in the ring.
Even the dubbing and dialogue flaws don’t manage to spoil what the movie is actually selling. The plot and character texture can afford to be afterthoughts when the choreography keeps delivering a relentlessly coordinated bloodbath, one practical, contortion-heavy setpiece at a time.
The Furious Kenji Tanigaki Kensuke Sonomura Lionsgate Midnight Madness Toronto People’s Choice Xie Miao Yang Enyou Joe Taslim Yayan Ruhian martial arts action Hong Kong film