★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
Here is the martial arts movie for people who don’t like martial arts movies. And by that I mean that “The Furious” is such a dazzling display of fists and feet of fury that even non-fans will appreciate the art in its churning choreographic movement. “The Furious,” now in theaters (the best way to catch it), is like the bastard child of “Taken” and “John Wick” set in Southeast Asia. Of course, if you don’t get jazzed by the mesmerizing mayhem dished out by director Kenji Tanigaki and fight stager Kensuke Sonomura, we are no longer talking.
The irony here is that “The Furious” is basically a tender father-daughter love story. It’s only when young Rainy (Yang Enyou) is kidnapped by a human trafficking ring that dad Wang Wei (Xie Miao), who is mute, starts with the bone crunching that speaks volumes. Father’s Day is only a week away and I’m nominating Wei, a simple tradesman, as daddy of the year. He’s been raising Rainy alone since the death of his wife.
Help comes for this distraught father in the form of Navin (Joe Taslim), an investigative journalist whose own wife, Matia (Thai legend JeeJa Yanin), has been snatched by the same syndicate under the control of the corrupt businessman Paklong (Joey Iwanga) who is the wealthy heir to a powerful family. Wei and Navin make quite the team. Xie is a Hong Kong martial artist who began his career playing Jet Li's son. Taslim is his Indonesian equivalent from “The Raid” who you may also have seen in “The Fast and the Furious 6.”
Here is the martial arts movie for people who don’t like martial arts movies. Prepare to be wowed.
I interrupt this review to confess that that “The Furious” is largely spoken in English and it sounds like the Tower of Babel or at least like a badly dubbed import from the days when Wuxia was relegated to grindhouses. Rainy speaks a Chinese dialect with English subtitles. The good news is that the script for “The Furious” is so godawful it only helps that hardly anyone speaks when they can punch or kick their feelings instead.
And it’s here that “The Furious” soars into the top ranks of cinema pow-pow-pow. When the Academy finally gets around to awarding Oscars for stunts (it was only this year that it started recognizing casting), “The Furious” should be used as a model on how to do it right with intricate camerawork that feels like bruising poetry in motion.
Each set piece is a marvel of escalating momentum enhanced by editing and sound sorcery. In one moment, Wei runs barefoot over shattered glass and rough terrain to catch the getaway car carrying his daughter. In another scene set in a building housing the crime syndicate, he tumbles, ducks and rolls over multiple floors in pursuit of Rainy’s captor through an underworld where evil seems to hide in plain sight.
To call these thunderous sequences thrilling is to understate the case. No hollow digital dazzle and green-screen trickery, just long practical takes of actors moving with artful precision and grace. “The Furious” is the rock & roll of kinetic action. Prepare to be wowed.