The opening title cards of Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious establish his latest work “somewhere in Southeast Asia,” which was more than telling of the kind of ‘people who know ball’-grade action cinema I had in store for me.
Chinese martial arts prodigy Xie Miao headlines. Indonesian judo champion-turned-screen bruiser Joe Taslim co-stars. The Raid legend Yayan Ruhian lurks around corners waiting to ruin somebody’s day. Vietnamese American stunt performer Brian Le even has the aesthetic profile of that one generic Street Fighter character (better yet, the durability of one that Capcom forgot to nerf).
A Hong Kong production shot in Bangkok and populated by martial artists drawn from mainland China, Indonesia, Thailand, Japan and several neighbouring action cinema traditions, The Furious is set in a deliberately anonymous Southeast Asian urban sprawl while wearing its influences with almost forensic specificity. This effectively places the film inside a strain of action filmmaking that feels increasingly endangered. Before directing features, Tanigaki built his career choreographing violence for stars such as Donnie Yen before graduating to the director’s chair, and The Furious imbibes those tried-and-tested cult action sensibilities, still trusting the performers to do the interesting part themselves.
The Furious (English/ Cantonese)
Director: Kenji Tanigaki
Cast: Xie Miao, Joe Taslim, Yayan Ruhian, Brian Le, Joey Iwanaga, JeeJa Yanin, Philip Ng
Runtime: 113 minutes
Storyline: A mute maintenance worker and a relentless journalist tear through a sprawling child-trafficking network in search for their missing
The film is ostensibly concerned with child traffickers, corrupt officials and wealthy predators operating behind institutional protection, and the tacky dialogues seem to be the obvious casualties for Tanigaki positively frothing at the mouth in the excitement of wanting to get back to the good stuff, but honestly, the simple pleasures of watching just a few extraordinarily gifted dudes attempt progressively insane acts of catastrophic bodily harm cannot be overstated.
The plot exists largely as a delivery mechanism. Xie plays a nameless mute handyman whose daughter Rainy is kidnapped after arriving from China to visit him. At the same time, investigative journalist Navin, played by Taslim, is searching for answers surrounding the disappearance of his wife Matia, who vanished while investigating the same trafficking operation. Their investigations eventually intersect because everybody in this movie is either hunting traffickers, protecting traffickers, funding traffickers or preparing to cave a trafficker’s ribcage inward with construction equipment.
A still from ‘The Furious’
| Photo Credit:
Lionsgate
The screenplay understands its assignment. The optional NPC interactions that count as conversations only occur because our two leads need to direct their unbridled rage towards the next available massacre. Several exchanges almost sound mistranslated, and that makes the script feel lazily assembled from placeholder dialogue, but it’s clearly a shortcoming Tanigaki regards as an acceptable trade-off for the perverse fun of filming somebody getting pummeled with a hammer every five minutes.
An early pursuit sequence begins with the familiar “kidnappers grabbed the wrong kid” premise. After Rainy is taken, our handyman chases her abductors through factory apparatus and across broken glass while wearing flip-flops, before getting clotheslined by a moving car. When the corrupt and bureaucratically paralysed police refuse to act, this absolute unit of a maintenance guy simply douses himself in ice water and downs a handful of painkillers before transforming into an Asian John Wick on Soulslike difficulty.
What follows is two hours of increasingly elaborate violence built around one of the most physically articulate ensembles assembled in recent memory. Every environmental detail can be turned into a weapon, an obstacle or both. Everything within hand’s reach exists in a state of latent combat readiness waiting for Tanigaki to activate it.
Xie has a hummingbird-like centre of gravity and fights with the fluid explosiveness that made him a child star opposite Jet Li during the 1990s. Taslim brings the heavier, more grounded aggression of competitive combat sports to his form. Though its bloodline runs through everything from Ong-Bak, The Raid, Flash Point, SPL and the golden age of Hong Kong stunt cinema more broadly, the remarkable achievement is how clearly Tanigaki differentiates the variety of styles. Contemporary action cinema has frequently reduced combat to interchangeable movement, but The Furious feels almost inspired by the shonen anime tendency of encoding characterisation into fighting styles, helping identify combatants from their silhouettes and rhythms alone.
A still from ‘The Furious’
| Photo Credit:
Lionsgate
The locations amplify that sensation. The ice factory filled with frozen corpses will likely be regarded as one of the year’s strongest action sequences. Characters slide, dodge, grapple, and crash into frozen bodies, fighting over whose skull a sledgehammer-shaped factory detritus will cave in next. Elsewhere, a nightclub containing an MMA cage, a dilapidated trafficking building and a police station showdown give our fighters an assortment of selectable maps to stage more blunt-force trauma.
The climactic police station assault, in particular, crystallises everything the film does well. By this point, the story has largely abandoned any pretence of restraint and transformed into a gathering of regional action cinema royalty exchanging increasingly hostile introductions. The eventual five-way faceoff is just so ridiculously cool to witness (the tête-à-tête between the stunt choreography and blocking really needs to be studied), and joins Jujutsu Kaisen’s instantly iconic three-way Domain Expansion at Sendai colony from earlier this year, in my entirely self-appointed Letterboxd list of all-timer multiplayer Mexican standoffs.
For the better part of a decade, action cinema has been trapped in an exhausting arms race of producing soulless trite that exists primarily to cash in on the extended shelf life afforded by franchise scaffolding, and The Furious has no interest in any of that. It simply boasts swaggering levels of confidence in the simple fact that audiences will still happily spend two hours watching a Hong Kong-style AMV scored to a veritable symphony of shattered bones on the big screen.
The Furious is currently running in theatres
Published – June 19, 2026 07:16 pm IST
