A quartet of screenwriters is credited in Kenji Tanigaki‘s “The Furious,” but just a single action choreographer: If you’ve ever doubted the adage that two heads (or indeed four) are better than one, here’s your validation. No one could accuse those scribes of working overtime in devising the barely-there plot and barely-care dialogue for this barn-burning martial arts movie, but said choreographer, Kensuke Sonomura, is considerably better value. An astonishing bloodbath of brute hand-to-hand combat, highly resourceful weaponry and gnarly bodily contortions, “The Furious” is such a feat of mass physical coordination that such niceties as character and narrative can afford to be an afterthought. Here’s a film where you come for the fighting and stay for the fighting, and are unlikely to feel shortchanged.
The third feature directed by Tanigaki — himself an accomplished action choreographer and stunt coordinator — this culture-blending Hong Kong production was scooped up for international distribution by Lionsgate following a noisy fall festival run that saw it come second in the People’s Choice voting in Toronto’s Midnight Madness section. Sure enough, it’s a crowdpleaser of the most raucous variety, likely to prompt mid-film bouts of applause after certain especially vigorous action setpieces, not to mention approving laughter at the more absurd aspects of its construction. With a good portion of its admittedly sparse dialogue in clunkily dubbed English — Mandarin, Thai and Tagalog also feature — this flamboyantly violent and brashly enjoyable affair is clearly targeting crossover cult status as it opens globally tomorrow, and could just get there.
If Chinese martial artist and erstwhile child star Xie Miao comes off best in the ensemble of a film not overly concerned with the more cerebral aspects of performance, that’s in part because he’s not saddled with any of the multilingually tin-eared dialogue. He plays a unnamed blue-collar worker stationed in an unnamed country, quite diplomatically billed onscreen only as “somewhere in Southeast Asia,” where child traffickers run riot and a corrupt police force doesn’t much care. That’s bad news for our nameless hero’s nine-year-old daughter Rainy (Yang Enyou, button-cute but with some pleasing grit), visiting from their native China. She’s swiftly poached by a band of criminals — who don’t seem to traffic kids so much as extensively torture them, as a lurid prologue has already established — and tossed in the back of a truck.
On the bright side, her father is a man with his own very particular set of skills — among them, maintaining a staggering sprint speed when chasing after that truck. In sandals, no less. That cues the first of the film’s centerpiece fight scenes: a relentless, momentum-shifting knockdown barney all playing out on the open bed on the moving vehicle, and all the more impressive for our guy’s unfortunate footwear: the kind of strange, witty detail that elevates much of the conflict throughout “The Furious.” He’s eventually thrown off — it’d be a short film if he weren’t — but finds backup in fellow lone wolf Navin (charismatic Joe Taslim, of “The Raid,” plus the recent “Mortal Kombat” films), whose journalist wife has gone missing while investigating this psychotic syndicate. In this case, at least, team work does make the dream work: They’re a formidable, physically complementary pair.
As they eventually track down the kidnappers to their industrial lair, everything shakes out exactly as you’d expect: The surprises are all in the bone-snapping, back-bending, sometimes literally eye-popping practical execution. Props are crucial throughout the film, as ladders, hammers and wooden pallets are all mostly creatively deployed to abet the fisticuffs; when the bloodied, exhausted combatants run out of ideas, they simply start throwing bicycles at each other. Why not? While an archery set is a more conventional instrument of death, it’s wielded with eerie poise by one diminutive villain played by Yayan Ruhian. (You’ll remember him, too, from “The Raid”: Much of the casting here nods to the film’s own genre aspirations.)
But the human body remains the chief weapon of choice here — smashed, shattered and somehow continuously reassembled through Sonomura’s inspired fight routines. The action of “The Furious” doesn’t aim for the balletic, gravity-defying elegance of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (with which the film shares a producer in Bill Kong) but a more visceral crunch of flesh on flesh, or sometimes on concrete. You certainly wouldn’t call it realistic — fighters mass and swarm and fill space in most unlikely configurations — but there’s an angular, tactile physicality to it all. 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 has an oily chemical radiance, while grinding guitars back up the carnage — but “The Furious” doesn’t move quite like anything else in the ring.
