Buddies v baddies … Miao Xie as Wang Wei, front, with Joe Taslim as Navin in The Furious. Photograph: Lionsgate/PA View image in fullscreen Buddies v baddies … Miao Xie as Wang Wei, front, with Joe Taslim as Navin in The Furious. Photograph: Lionsgate/PA Film Review The Furious review – dial-shifting dadsploitation mayhem as father goes in search of kidnapped daughter There’s more than a whiff of Taken in Kenji Tanigaki’s exhilarating martial-arts movie, in which a handyman goes after some evil people traffickers
Prefer the Guardian on Google I t keeps happening: every few years, usually during a run of lethargic Hollywood spectacles, the Overton window of screen violence gets recalibrated by a muscular wonder from the east. Thundering along in the bloody footsteps of the Raid films and the Hindi punch-’em-up Kill, this martial-arts showcase from Japanese-born, Hong Kong-based director Kenji Tanigaki opens in generic dadsploitation territory. “Somewhere in Southeast Asia”, as a caption has it, mute Chinese handyman Wang Wei (Miao Xie) tears off after the traffickers who have nabbed his daughter (Enyou Yang). Having Hulk-smashed its way out of the Taken box, though, The Furious starts to crank it up. Boy, does it crank it up; the closing half-hour achieves a pummelling intensity unlikely to be matched by any other release this year.
There are one or two plot developments. Cribbing from John Woo’s buddy movies, Tanigaki has his hero run into an undercover journo (Danny Dyer lookalike Joe Taslim) with his own reasons for chasing the traffickers; this route-one approach bears out the advantages of keeping things simple while turning the dial to 11. The complexities are reserved for the frame itself: jaw-droppingly limber, seemingly boneless performers pull off bruising manoeuvres on concrete floors, with Tanigaki’s well-placed cameras capturing unexpected delicacies and flourishes amid otherwise crunching dustups. It’s as if someone has brought a crossbow and a ballpeen hammer to the dance, and they’re intent on using them.
The Saturday night crowd won’t care, but Tanigaki doesn’t quite have the architectural sense that elevated the Raid films. The precision of its set pieces, though, is inarguable, with the editing crafting soaring rhymes between bodies in motion. Climaxing with a royal rumble for the ages, Tanigaki’s film is not quite as bludgeoning as it might have been, tempering its ferocity with athletic and technical skill, matching that intensity with invention and delivering as much exhilaration as evisceration. One note of warning: you may require a long lie down afterwards.
The Furious is in UK cinemas from 26 June.