Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious unleashes nonstop, inventive martial-arts violence on child traffickers—so viciously staged that even The Raid starts to look restrained, even as the film stumbles on character and cohesion.
A child gets snatched off the street, and within moments the movie has already decided what kind of experience it wants to be: frantic, relentless, and willing to treat brutality like the main event.
In Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious. child traffickers choose the wrong girl to abduct—beginning with a tradesman’s daughter who is taken and a journalist named Matia (Thai action star Jija Yanin) who later disappears after being hit by an arrow to the head. The violence doesn’t pause long enough for the story to settle. and Tanigaki pushes the aftermath into a full-throttle action sprint that’s staged with such speed and variation it can make other recent martial-arts assaults feel comparatively mild.
Those opening choices feed the film’s momentum. Matia’s husband and colleague Navin (Joe Taslim) goes undercover in the “Somewhere” crime world to find out what happened to her. He doesn’t have long to operate alone, either. Wang Wei (Xie Miao). a non-verbal tradesman known for catching hammers. sensing villains. and running 100 miles per hour in flip-flops. drifts into Navin’s hunt—carrying the unsettling feeling that he has a violent past. The Furious keeps that assumption alive without fully cashing it out. even as it keeps sweeping everyone forward into the next fight.
The film’s bilingual, street-level geography also becomes part of the chaos. Shot on the streets of Bangkok. Thailand. The Furious opens with an opening title card that places it “Somewhere in Southeast Asia.” From there. it juggles characters who speak Mandarin. Tagalog. English. and overdubbed English. while the main character doesn’t speak at all—yet the movie insists the villains and heroes understand one another through sheer force. It’s a deliberate hodgepodge. scripted by a foursome of Hong Kong writers—Mak Tin-shu. Lei Zhilong. Shum Kwan-sin. and Frank Hui—and the result is a film that treats communication like something you settle with fists.
That tone matches the cast of fighters the movie introduces. The Furious puts Yayan Ruhian’s presence to work as a bow-wielding maniac who never changes out of his “Royal Tenenbaums” tracksuit. And when Navin and Wang eventually collide—after trying to kill their way through the same nightclub. complete with an active MMA cage in the middle of the dancefloor—the film is already locked into its favorite mode: setpieces built to surprise. then escalate.
One of the early sequences follows Wang as he chases the kidnappers who’ve taken Rainy (Yang Enyou). It’s a bruising sequence that pushes through fights with a street fighter and a 250lb. baby (Brian Le. known from Everything Everywhere All at Once. playing the sweetly imbecilic “son” of a local crime boss) during a scrap on the flatbed of a truck. From there. the movie keeps offering big. different-looking brawls—its signature style being that it lets mixed fighting traditions clash rather than choreograph them into neat categories.
Wang leans into Chinese martial arts. and his early opponents blend Pencak Silat and Muay Thai. with a pinch of Eddy Gordo-flavored capoeira fighting thrown into the mix. But Tanigaki doesn’t stage these traditions like rival bouts in classic Shaw Brothers formality. Instead. it’s more scattershot. more kinetic. more cartoonish abandon—especially in a later scuffle where Wang and Navin face Le’s character together inside an industrial freezer. fighting between (and sometimes with) fresh corpses completely encased in giant slabs of ice.
The Furious doesn’t hide the technical ambition either. At times it favors camerawork that can feel slippery for its own good. and the choreography becomes chaotic enough that the mess starts to feel intentional—like the movie is chasing motion rather than clarity. Even the instances that flirt with digital replacement are treated like part of the spectacle; the CGI blood is described as refreshingly credible. and Tanigaki leans into realism with crazed long takes whenever possible.
The violence also arrives with setpiece logic: when bodies hit the ground, the fights often don’t stop. Wang and Navin scrabble and tumble while the film tries to exalt the fusion of Chinese martial arts and MMA—most visibly when Wang fights atop a human pyramid of the henchman he has beaten into submission.
And then the movie escalates again, because it can. Wang gets sideswiped by a speeding car in a way that the film suggests would be hilarious if it didn’t look incredibly painful. Elsewhere, it keeps stacking peaks, even as the story sometimes struggles to keep pace with itself.
Giddy about its props and generally tongue-in-cheek about a plot centered on trafficking small children. The Furious still carries a few errant twinges of self-seriousness—though Tanigaki never forgets he’s making beaten-to-a-pulp fiction. The film’s sociopathic main villain (Joey Iwanaga) remains harder to lock in than the colorful goons surrounding him. There’s also unevenness in pacing and space. including a later sequence set in an overcrowded tenement complex when the story feels “a little busy for its own good.”.
Even that stumble doesn’t stop the movie from finding its best final burst. The best setpiece is held for last, and it lands despite the film’s struggles—reworking the “Oldboy” hallway fight concept into a drive-by motorcycle stunt.
The result is a chaotic, brutal action movie that presses hardest when it’s not trying to be careful. In the middle of all that blood-and-bones momentum. the film lands the kind of punch it wants: the action is staged with such variety and intensity that. for American theatergoers. it’s positioned as the action movie of the year so far.
Grade: B+
The Furious is now playing in theaters.
The Furious Kenji Tanigaki Jija Yanin Joe Taslim Xie Miao Yayan Ruhian child trafficking action movie martial arts Bangkok Hong Kong writers Joey Iwanaga Brian Le