There have been any number of movies about kidnappers who choose the wrong girl to abduct (e.g. “Man on Fire,” “The Searchers,” “Saving Silverman”), but none of the kidnappers in any of those movies have ever chosen wronger than the child traffickers in Kenji Tanigaki’s “The Furious,” who snatch a tradesman’s daughter off the streets and then pay for their insolence by getting their shit absolutely rocked off the bone for the rest of an action film so brutal that it makes “The Raid” feel like “Paddington” by comparison. (OK, that might be overstating the case a little, but it was fun to type out.)
Which isn’t to say Tanigaki’s braindead symphony of blood and skull-bashings is necessarily gorier than any of the recent martial arts movies that it aspires to one-up (though it does feature one of the coldest decapitations you’ll ever see on screen), but rather to express that its frenetic ultra-violence is staged with a vision and variety that allows each of its 9,349,082.5 hammer blows to the head to hit with the same 4DX force as the first. “The Furious” is too sloppy to stand alongside the true masterpieces of its genre, but it iterates with the best of them, drawing from a fistful of different styles and traditions to create a fresh and unpredictable beat-em-up that never allows you to go numb.
Helmed by the Japanese director of “Enter the Fat Dragon,” scripted by a foursome of Hong Kong writers (Mak Tin-shu, Lei Zhilong, Shum Kwan-sin, and Frank Hui), and shot on the streets of Bangkok, Thailand, “The Furious” immediately announces itself as a melting pot of martial artistry — at the expense of anything else. An amusingly vague opening title card drops us “Somewhere in Southeast Asia,” kicking off an unrepentant hodgepodge of a movie where some of the characters speak Mandarin, some of the characters speak Tagalog, some of the characters speak English, some of the characters speak horrendously overdubbed English, the main character doesn’t speak at all, and everyone understands each other through the universal language of a lead pipe to the dome.
Anyway, as we’ve covered, someone is snatching up children on the streets of wherever, and everyone who goes looking for them is never seen again. The latest adult to disappear: A journalist named Matia (Thai action star Jija Yanin), who gets an arrow to the head courtesy of “The Raid” icon Yayan Ruhian (delivering another iconic performance, this time as a bow-wielding maniac who never changes out of his “Royal Tenenbaums” tracksuit). That doesn’t sit particularly well with Matia’s husband and colleague Navin (the indomitable Joe Taslim, also from “The Raid”), who goes undercover in the cutthroat “Somewhere” crime world to find out what happened to her.
But Navin won’t have to do it alone. Enter: Wang Wei (Chinese wushu champ and “The New Legend of Shaolin” star Xie Miao), a non-verbal tradesman whose talents for catching hammers, sensing villains, and running 100 miles per hour in flip-flops suggests that he might have a secret history of killing people. “The Furious” never dissuades us from that assumption, but — inexplicably — it never follows through on it either. I suppose that’s par for the course in a film where even workaday reporters are unstoppable killing machines, but it does a raise a few nagging questions when our hero transforms into a fighter at the level of peak Jet Li after some thugs nab his daughter Rainy (Yang Enyou) to meet their human trafficking quotas.
It isn’t long before Wang and Navin bump into each other after trying to kill their way through the same nightclub (which, like all great nightclubs, has an active MMA cage in the middle of the dancefloor), but “The Furious” is already firing on all cylinders by the time they strike their fateful alliance. The early sequence where Wang chases after the kidnappers who’ve stolen Rainy is a bruising display of what this movie does best, as Wang squares off against a rangy street fighter and a 250lb. baby (“Everything Everywhere All at Once” stuntman Brian Le as the sweetly imbecilic “son” of a local crime boss) in a madcap scrap on the flatbed of a truck. Like all of the film’s most fist-pumping setpieces, of which there are several, the getaway brawl is a fevered array of different fighting styles that smash into each other like concrete blocks to create something faintly new.
Wang prefers Chinese martial arts, and his first opponents lean towards a combination of Pencak Silat and Muay Thai (with a pinch of Eddy Gordo-flavored capoeira fighting mixed in for good measure), but “The Furious” is far too chaotic to pit these styles against each other with the formalism of a rival bout in Shaw brothers classic. On the contrary, Tanigaki and action choreographer Kensuke Sonomura (“Baby Assassins”) let them rip with the kind of cartoonish abandon best displayed during a later scuffle where Wang and Navin take on Le’s character together inside an industrial freezer, the three of them fighting between — and sometimes with — fresh corpses that are completely encased within giant slabs of ice. It’s the perfect setting for an action movie where the camerawork is always a touch too slippery for its own good, and the choreography just anarchic enough to make that mess feel like more of a feature than a bug.
Giddy with its props and consistently tongue-in-cheek for a movie about trafficking small children (the script has a few errant twinges of self-seriousness, but Tanigaki never forgets that he’s making a work of beaten-to-a-pulp fiction), “The Furious” generally strikes a thrilling balance between the slapstick insanity of Jackie Chan and the more punishing barbarity of his successors. At one point, Wang gets sideswiped by a speeding car in a way that would be hilarious if it didn’t look so incredibly painful.
Some digital trickery may have been employed in that particular instance, but the CGI blood is refreshingly credible as far as that goes, and Tanigaki underlines the realism of his stunts with crazed long takes whenever he can; few of them are showy, but most enhance the clumsy acrobatics of fights that don’t stop even when both of the combatants are lying on the ground. Those scrambly moments on the ground typify how eager the director is to exalt in the combination of Chinese martial arts and MMA, a fusion most obvious in the scene where Wang fights atop a human pyramid of the henchman that he’s beaten into submission.
That highlight is just a fun little flourish in the middle of a setpiece that seems to peak several times over, as several of the action setpieces in “The Furious” do. The best of them is saved for last, and works in spite of the film’s struggle to make its sociopathic main villain (Joey Iwanaga) as interesting as its colorful array of goons. The least effective of the lot, set in an overcrowded tenement complex at a moment when the story is getting a little busy for its own good, snaps back into focus on the strength of a single motorcycle stunt that reimagines the “Oldboy” hallway fight as a drive-by. That unevenness nags over the course of a movie that crushes everything it cares about and thoughtlessly spackles together the rest, but when the highs are this high, you’d be mad to focus on what comes between them. This is the action movie of the year so far as American theatergoers should be concerned, and nothing else really comes close.
Grade: B+
“The Furious” is now playing in theaters.
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