The Furious: familiar revenge cinema gets an exuberant martial-arts workout

Tanigaki Kenji built his reputation as an action choreographer in Hong Kong and Japan, doing much of his best work with directors Donnie Yen and Otomo Keishi. The Furious offers a blueprint for a Pan-Asian action cinema, drawing talent from China, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, the USA, and Indonesia. With dialogue in sign language, Mandarin, and English, the story is set “Somewhere in Southeast Asia”; the unnamed locale both anywhere and nowhere. 

The premise is instantly familiar from Pierre Morel’s Taken (2008) or Lee Jeong-beom’s The Man From Nowhere (2010), which Tanigaki is reportedly remaking. A mute handyman, Wang Wei (Xie Miao), searches for his daughter, Rainy (Yang Enyou), after she is kidnapped by a trafficking gang. Wang joins forces with Navin (Joe Taslim) whose journalist wife (Jeeja Yanin) vanished while investigating the missing children. Together, they brawl their way through legions of henchmen on a trail leading to ambitious crime lord Paklung (Joey Iwanaga) and his deadly bodyguard Tak (Yayan Ruhian). 

The single-minded, linear plot invites comparisons to Prachya Pinkaew’s Ong-Bak (2003) and Gareth Evans’s The Raid (2011), although Tanigaki doesn’t share Evans’ love for gore nor Pinkaew’s focus on VFX-free stunts. Spikes of humour counterbalance the violence and help ameliorate the more preposterous moments when Tanigaki abandons any pretense at credibility, his combatants’ durability positively cartoonish. Xie seethes with righteous anger as Wang, his fury writ in his twitching muscles. He’s the indefatigable everyman, his mysterious origin unexplained. Like Jackie Chan, his martial expertise is transtextual, established by Xie’s past as a child actor opposite Jet Li in My Father Is A Hero (1995). 

Taslim possesses a natural, easy charisma, while the impressively precocious Yang brings pathos to the chaos. Stuntman Brian Le nearly steals the show as the burly bruiser Ho, combining exuberance with a remarkable agility that belies his imposing, muscular bulk. Aside from Le, the supporting characters are the movie’s weakest link, a collection of stock stereotypes from sneering gangsters to the hilariously corrupt police chief. 

Ultimately, The Furious stands or falls on the action scenes and Tanigaki delivers a parade of visceral throwdowns, tightly choreographed, shot, and edited. However, the intensity peaks prematurely and Tanigaki fails to deliver a grand catharsis for his long-suffering hero, fumbling the climax with a scene of Wang and Paklung clumsily swatting each other with bicycles. Nonetheless, the commitment to relentless mayhem positions The Furious in the tradition of 1970s kung fu cinema and as a crowd-pleaser. 

► The Furious is in UK cinemas 26 June