This week, I was lucky enough to catch an advance screening of The Furious, a fiery new Hong Kong martial arts movie from director Kenji Tanigaki.
Prior to the AMC Screen Unseen where I caught the film, anxious moviegoers online speculated about the week’s mystery title, all but praying for The Furious, which made a splash with its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival. The word from TIFF was that The Furious was choreographed wall-to-wall with brutal, delightful martial arts action–and the film delivered beautifully on that simple promise.
In terms of plot, it’s a basic action film mechanism designed only to set our protagonist in motion for his indulgent killing spree. Wang Wei’s daughter is kidnapped–he needs to get her back. He teams up with a journalist, Navin, whose wife has gone missing pursuing the same group of kidnappers. It’s nothing revolutionary in terms of story, but I felt that the simple story set the stage well for the action.
As with John Wick, it’s easy to sympathize with these characters, and I felt emotionally connected enough to the story to wince in fear for them when things got hairy. It’s certainly more than a film like Nobody bothers to give you–a story in which we’re supposed to root for a man who has no other motivation to return to a life of violence than some suburban ennui. Wang Wei is a man who, like John Wick, cherished the peaceful life he’d built, which is why it’s moving to watch him mourn its loss.
As for the action, it delivers completely on the post-TIFF rumblings of greatness. So much of this movie is spent in full-throttle fight mode that upon leaving the theatre, I heard another viewer remark in awe, “Was that, like…just an hour long fight scene for the second half?” It’s bloody, it’s outrageous, it’s choreographed like a beautiful, synchronized dance, and it’s endlessly enthralling. It was also less gruesome than expected–while people are absolutely getting demolished left and right, it’s largely a cartoonish violence I’d compare to that of a Tarantino flick.
It was also heartening to see the female characters in the film get a little more love than I’m used to seeing in this kind of movie. Navin’s wife kicks the movie off with an excellent fight scene, and throughout the film, Wang Wei’s daughter is clever, brave, and badass. She even gets in a few hits of her own against the endless swarm of bad guys. It’s a delight to have compelling female characters to root for, when all too often we get only amorphous caricatures of damsels in distress.
If you’re a fan of action films, this one is not to be missed. I love John Wick as much as the next guy, but a few minutes into The Furious, the scales fell from my eyes, and I thought to myself, “Oh yeah, fistfights ARE cooler than guns.”
The Furious is set to hit theaters on June 12.
