A roiling, brawling, powerhouse that trades dialogue finesse for pure, punishing momentum – and delivers exactly what it promises, a ten-tonne juggernaut of action.
★★★★★
There’s a particular electricity that shows up in a great gonzo midnight movie, when the film stops being something you watch and turns into something you ride. The Furious is optimised for just that experience. It’s a ten-tonne juggernaut of action charges forth with diesel-powered momentum, each set-piece brawl hitting harder than the last until the cumulative effect sent my particular audience into a frenzy of cheers.
Set “somewhere in South east Asia” – thank you, inter-titles – the film follows a mute handyman (Xie Miao) forced into action when his young daughter is abducted by a human trafficking ring. When the authorities offer little help, he begins to tear through the network himself, each step drawing him deeper into a system built on violence and exploitation. Along the way he encounters a journalist (Joe Taslim) searching for his missing wife, and their overlapping quests pull them into an uneasy alliance as they close in on the same target. The narrative is streamlined to say the least, but serves to link the brutally kinetic set pieces. Because did I mention that both of these men are extraordinarily skilled at kicking ass?
Director Kenji Tanigaki shoots with a choreographer’s eye, so movement drives the film from the ground up, bodies colliding, recoiling, resetting, and going again in sequences that feel worked out in space rather than assembled later. That background, including his work alongside Donnie Yen, runs through the film’s DNA, and it shows in the way the geography stays legible while wave upon wave of excitable henchmen themselves onto our heroes like hunks of steak throwing themselves into a meat grinder.
The comparison point is inevitably going to be The Raid, and the film leans into that lineage, with Joe Taslim and supporting baddie Yayan Ruhian serving as reminders of that movie’s influence, while Xie Miao anchors things with a stripped-back physicality built from endurance and control rather than speech, so that the film never drops focus for a second.
That intensity feeds into a broader tradition – genre movies where bonds are forged under pressure, codes of loyalty are put to the test, and where violence carries a trace of melancholy – the stylised traditions of heroic bloodshed, and the spaghetti western.
There are some minor flaws if you’re being picky: some too-obvious CGI creeps in at key moments, slightly undercutting the crunch of the battles. And while some enjoyably ropey English dialogue plays like a throwback to the mistranslated oddities of older imports, adding a layer of charm, though there is a faint uncanny quality to the way everyone’s lips have been AI-synced to the English ADR.
Nevertheless, the first-pumping, crowd-pleasing moments more than make up for it; this is the action film of the year. It hits with force throughout, and if you have the means I strongly recommend seeing The Furious as I did, in a Louisiana theatre, if only for the added pleasure of someone behind you screaming “DAWGAWWWWWWNE” in a Cajun accent at each new piece of deranged fight choreography.
The Furious played at the Overlook Film Festival in New Orleans
Whitlock&Pope 