It seems that every decade, the gods of ludicrously brutal martial arts movies see fit to deliver us generational examples of very angry people pounding the living snot out of each other. Back in the 2000s, we were introduced to the jaw-dropping physical abilities of Tony Jaa as he punched, kicked and flipped his way through Prachya Pinkaew’s astonishing Ong-Bak. In the 2010s, the genre gear shifted once more when Indonesian dwelling Welshman, Gareth Evans, directed the superlative The Raid, which introduced a whole raft of fist-flingers that introduced to us the likes of Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim and Yayan Ruhian.
I don’t know about you, but I was in the mood for yet another seismic impact in the realms of savage, martial arts cinema and while Timo Tjahjanto kept us entertained with Raid-like movies such as Headshot and The Night Comes For Us, we needed someone to come and change the game once more. Believe me, the Furious is that film.
In an unnamed city in Southwest Asia, child trafficking has hit chillingly high levels thanks to the police being about as useful as a chocolate teapot. In this moral-free cesspit, we find Wang Wei, a scarred and mute handyman with a murky past who only wants to live a simple life and ensure the safety of his young daughter, Rainy by sending her to live with relatives in China. However, after the good-hearted girl is suckered in by a lame child falsely begging for help, it seems that she’s destined to be the next youngster to suddenly disappear off of the face of the earth. However, Wei proves to be an exceptionally handy handyman when, after giving chase, we find that his iffy past comes with some fairly devastating fighting skills. However, while he’s ultimately unsuccessful in retrieving Rainy (mostly thanks to hulking, simple-minded, jovial bruiser named Ho), and discovers there’s a more sinister reason why the police can’t seem to stop these guys, that doesn’t deter him from attempting to tear the city down while looking for clues and hitting various people.
Said clues come with Navin, a man who is also fairly quick with his fists and has been spending the last few months desperately trying to find his journalist wife who vanished while trying to break the trafficking ring on her own. With the two paired up in an uneasy truce, they pit both their investigative skills and their ability to punch scumbags really, really hard to finally take this insidious organisation apart and hopefully be reunited with their respective loved ones.
However, a colourful and utterly psychotic band of henchmen are at hand to ensure that doesn’t happen and even if Wei and Navin boast formidable bone breaking skills, can they hope to be a match for the sledgehammer welding Ho, the arrow shooting Tak and Pak Lung, the leader of the operation who seems to be way less stable than his tailored suits and pregnant wife let on…
Yes, The Furious is another film that revels in soaking it’s impossibly lithe cast in blood while demanding that they trawl through some sort of grotty, Asian hellhole of a city, but while there are obvious comparisons to be made with every martial arts film to have come down the pipe since The Raid, it isn’t just squalid savagery that makes Kenji Tanigaki’s epic stand out. For a start, there’s some familiar faces here just primed for rearranging, as Raid alumni Joe Taslim and Yayan Ruhian both deliver another virtuous good guy and tracksuited maniac respectively – but while their presence is a reassuring guarantee of quality, it’s the other characters who somehow stand out more starting with Xie Miao’s wordless Wei. Already pre-battered and rendered mute by whatever hellish path molded him such, our hero may be on a basic, save-my-daughter mission we’ve seen a thousand times before, but the sheer determination the film brings to his plight takes the action to some spectacular places.
In the first action sequence alone, we witness our hero give chase to a fleeing truck barefoot as random detritus on the road succeed in carving up his feet like pre-sliced bread, but fail to slow him down as he continues his pursuit like a bleeding T-1000, and from here, the Passion Of The Christ style abuse he absorbs throughout the rest of the film only increases. Adding to the sense of grisly unreality are some bizarre villains who all come with the completely different fighting styles and different looks you’d find in a particularly vicious beat-em up video game. While we’ve already covered Ruhian’s bow twanging maniac, Brian Le’s brawny, childlike Ho also proves to be a major crowd pleaser as he fights by flinging his hefty bulk around with a devil may care attitude. Rounding things out is Joey Iwanaga’s uber baddie, Pak Lung, who makes up for having virtually no character development until the final half hour of the film by suddenly revealing himself as a demented, lightning-legged nut job that could be the most dangerous foe of all.
Of course, in the world of martial arts gore epics, some of the story telling goes a little awry in order to feed the fight sequences and The Furious is no different. The constant (and frankly unnecessary) switching between languages gets a little distracting at times and an entire sub-plot involving a conflicted police force is in danger of slowing the frenzied down, but once those fists start connecting, you won’t care one jot as Tanigaki and his team of trained brutality wizards are dedicated to delivering some of the best fight scenes seen within the last ten years. Merciless in their execution, yet horrifically beautiful in their own way, The Furious manages to deliver a string of complex head kickings that never feels repetitive, yet always feels innovative. Be it a sledgehammer fight in a ice factory, or Wei evening the odds in an underground fight club by bringing a hammer from his tool kit, the film stages impressive hog piles that frequently sees three or four fighters get tangled up in their own limbs while Xie Miao nimbly climbs all over them like a shit-kicking insect. However, as stunning as it all is, it’s nothing compared to a truly transcendant climax that’s genuinely in with a chance to be one of the best final brawls in a martial arts movie that you’ve ever fucking seen. A meticulous melee that sees five people split into three teams and then relentlessly try to kill each other all at the same time isn’t just the most finely choreographed and expertly shot sequences of the year, it’s superior to virtually everything that’s come along in the last few decades and it’ll have a like-minded audience whooping and hollering at the sheer attention to detail and hugely enjoyable head trauma.
I was wondering when we’d get this decade’s premium slice of brain pulverising magnificence, but even I was taken aback by the mastery on display here that goes far beyond happily watching child traffickers get beaten to death. Come for the scummy ambiance and gargantuan levels of violence, stay for one of the finest climaxes that you’ve experienced in quite a while as a quintet of lunatics beat each other’s skulls in for our entertainment. Mark my words, you’ll be furious if you miss this.
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