‘The Furious’ is the most inventive action film this year

Its prologue sees a fight-savvy journalist Matia (Thai action star Jija Yanin) infiltrating an underground sex slavery outfit “somewhere in Southeast Asia,” setting the stage for an adrenaline-fueled unfurling. Within its opening minutes, there are bows and arrows, broken bones, and dancelike choreography that sees fighters swimming along the ground between punches and kicks, ensuring there isn’t a minute to breathe from one major strike to the next. And yet, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The movie’s nebulous Southeast Asian setting allows culture and politics to become a symbolic backdrop. In the process, the Thai filming locations play host to a Japanese stunt crew, a Hong Kong production, and lead actors ranging from Chinese and Indonesian to Americans of Vietnamese and Japanese descent—not to mention, an equally diverse medley of martial arts styles, including Muay Thai, Kung Fu and Silat. Granted, this global approach also yields strange aural artifacts, like authentic Mandarin and Tagalog being peppered with awkwardly dubbed American English reminiscent of localized 1970s Wuxia films. However, spoken language may as well be an afterthought in a movie that follows pro-wrestling logic on multiple levels.

For one thing, it’s the unique martial arts movie in which multiple brawlers are all equally at each other’s throats. For another, everyone, no matter their occupation, is proficient in hand-to-hand combat, which turns out to be the lingua franca for everything from negotiations to family reunions. It’s what allows Matia’s boyfriend Navin (The Raid 2 star Joe Taslim) to not only infiltrate the aforementioned trafficking ring after she goes missing, but it also affords the film a number of zero-to-60 accelerations. No matter the scenario, fisticuffs are usually just a disagreement away.

The story’s core belongs to nonverbal Chinese handyman Wang Wei (Xie Miao), who communicates with his pre-teen daughter Rainy (Yang Enyou) in Chinese Sign Language while training her in kung fu. The pair experience some moody father-daughter tensions as they discuss Rainy’s impending return to China, but as their argument reaches its peak, the young tyke finds herself scooped up via truck by a group of highly skilled street thugs, led by the large and lumbering Ho (Brian Le), a henchman whose repeated head trauma has left him both mentally impaired and physically fearless.

From there on out, this bare-bones story explodes with violence at frequent intervals, starting with Wang chasing down Ho and his cohorts on foot, resulting in full-bodied fight scenes with wince-inducing impact. Fists and feet fly between characters as quickly as torsos are tossed across the screen, while existing injuries (like Wang’s own bout of head trauma) threaten to derail the proceedings. The Furious is a film in which heroes get horrendously hurt, and everyone from children to pregnant women are fair game for mounting brutality—which only makes sense, in a tale whose villains perfectly fit the Jeffrey Epstein era. However, rather than political navigations, protagonists like Wang and Navin (who become accidental allies during their respective rescue missions) must snake their way through mafia hierarchies, while facing down villains like Joey Iwanaga’s psychotic business magnate Paklung, his archer bodyguard Tak (The Raid’s Yayan Ruhian) and his skeevy, cowboy hat-wearing, shotgun-toting enforcer Song (Sahajak Boonthanakit).

In balancing these various forces, Tanigaki and editor Chris Tonick tend to move inelegantly between dialogue scenes. But that the movie’s structure is only borderline functional is a worthwhile trade off, since it gets us to each fight scene faster. What follows from there on out involves knives, hammers, ladders, bottles, a variety of office and household objects turned into dangerous weapons, and bodies that pile up mid-fight to create dazzling tableaus that send the action tumbling sideways, upward, and in directions that shouldn’t exist. If fight choreography is like dance, then The Furious practically incorporates cheerleading with its human pyramids.

The brutality is sprawling and mischievous, though on occasion, it’s also too cheeky for its own good, promising the involvement of some of the kidnapped children as well. This seldom comes to fruition, but Wang’s daughter being trained in kung fu results in just enough narrative autonomy for her to be a delightful fixture. In any action movie that flies out the gate, the name of the game is escalation, and The Furious practically changes the rules, with its cheer-inducing combinations of crisscrossing fighters of shifting allegiances, and the jaw-dropping coordination of its at-length climactic battle. This includes crosscutting between as many as five major characters, whose two-way, sometimes three-way sparring cross pollinates in seemingly infinite combinations. Just when you think it can’t get any more resourceful, it evolves in unforeseen ways.

This conceptual inflation continues longer than you might expect, but the movie only runs out of steam right near the end of its 113 minutes, with only the slightest anti-climax. Until then, it remains a wildly imaginative work of martial arts cinema, one that pushes the boundaries of what’s possible on screen when every element of your filmmaking machine feels entirely in sync. Rare are the movies where the story falling apart doesn’t really matter, but The Furious functions on such a visceral level that its most emotional moments erupt from the fighting itself. The action becomes not only an extension of story and characters, but is so magnificently conceived that it does the impossible by practically replacing them.