Review: The Furious

Hold the "The Fast And..."

With my slimes!

Lemme tell you something I really appreciate about The Furious. Right into it, no intro, no preamble, no framing device, no ice, no chaser. This is not that sort of film.

When the average viewer reads the marketing copy and sits down to watch, they do so with the basic idea that The Furious is mostly just meant to sound kinda hard. Provocative. Gets the people going. Doesn’t really mean anything. It’s about some dudes and they’re mad as hell, yeah, sure, The Furious. Wrong!

There is one specific shot, totally unmissable and mostly pointless, that establishes exactly who The Furious are, and lemme tell ya when they dropped that bad boy on me, I realized that it was utterly pointless to call balls and strikes here. There’s no sofascore with this sort of thing, no advanced analytics, none of that. Oh there’s a bit of rough CGI, or the dubbing is distracting, oh the script and plot are such generic pastiche. Get in the locker, nerd. This shit is too real for you.

The Furious is by some distance the best film I’ve seen all year, and its straightforward, transparent ambition to do nothing but kick ass for one-hundred-and-twenty minutes straight is a large part of what makes it such an unambiguous landmark in action filmmaking. We outsmart ourselves too often, these days. In attempting to find something original or subversive within the genre constraints we fail to consider that we may simply not be trying hard enough to push the boundaries in the conventional directions. Maybe our records can break more records. Maybe we gotta stop trying to be more clever than film itself, and start asking ourselves if we’re a different animal, and the same beast.

“What the fuck does that mean Jay Dubya?”

You’re welcome.

The Furious opens “Somewhere in Southeast Asia” (it’s Thailand) where a syndicate of human traffickers operates with impunity preying on the children of the poor and vulnerable. Seeking his wife, who disappeared chasing the story, an investigative journalist with the plot-necessary fight skills conducts a daring solo infiltration of the syndicate. Solo, that is, until the daughter of a mute Chinese handyman with a mysterious past is snatched off the street in broad daylight. The police are apathetic and the clock is ticking. What is an honest working man and kung-fu practitioner to do but lace up his steel-toed boots, get the biggest, meanest hammer he owns, and go find his baby girl?

That’s it! That’s all you need! We got two dads (one of them doesn’t have kids but he’s dad-coded, lotta dads without kids these days we can’t hold it against him) and they’re gonna find brotherhood, justice, and fight every single scumbag, freak, and sleazeoid between them and that little girl. We’re off and running!

It’s a long held belief of mine that action filmmaking is first and foremost a technician’s medium. Film is, of course, an art form and there is ample room for artistry but in the realm of kinetic performance, the application of practical skills is paramount. What is Michael Bay without an inch-perfect gasoline orange explosion? What is Michael Mann without the deafening base of a painstakingly captured gunshot? What is John Woo without sparks and flying debris?

I think, however, this theory has failed to emphasize the immense contributions of stunt and fight team performers, whose technical skill lies not in the application of the hard sciences but in a kind of masochistic, balletic asceticism. Jackie Chan needed guys to go through glass panes to make Police Story (and certainly led by example in that regard). You can’t set a man on fire on film without someone being willing to put the burn suit on. Even John Ford could not have made John Ford movies without a whole brigade of movie cowboys willing to take the hazard pay to fall off a horse on command. The stuntman is increasingly an endangered species in Hollywood filmmaking, as the warm amoeba embrace of CGI swallows us all. But East Asia remains a bunker against the tides of progress in that regard. Under the direction of veteran stunt performer and coordinator Kenji Tanigaki, The Furious is a testament to what can be accomplished when the stuntmen are allowed to make a film of their own. It’s a film which prefers to communicate its intelligence through physical performance and rewards viewers that can speak its preferred language. Let me give you an example: I have never seen a martial arts film this dedicated to ensuring its key players are distinct not just through costuming, but through the actual language of martial arts. Every major character in this story has a distinct style and by the time The Furious reaches its frenetic, bloody conclusion, you are fluent in everyone’s distinct language of combat.

While everyone here is operating at a superlative level, special mention in my book is due to Brian Le for one of the all-time brute performances in a martial arts movie, bringing bone-crunching force and animal agility to what would otherwise be another big bald shithouse character. I would be remiss, also, to not mention the Indonesian penchak silat legend Yayan Ruhian, who film fans will remember as that creepy looking guy with the scraggly hair from The Raid. His appearance solidifies his bona fides as one of the all-time martial arts baddies, up in the firmament with Bolo Yeung, Chuck Norris, and Benny Urquidez. He doesn’t need a character. With his distinctive look and physical talents he embodies more authentic menace than any script could ever give him. Tanigaki and the rest of the fight team brain trust on this production still gave him a compound bow and a pair of kukri short swords because this is a quality film.

It’s worth invoking The Raid because I don’t think we’ve seen an original martial arts film this gnarly, bloody, and mean since Gareth Evans’ 2011 action landmark. As The Furious enters its delirious final act, it authors what may be the bloodiest climactic fight in a film since the original Kill Bill with maybe five percent of the participants. The commitment and artistry from all involved is humbling, and makes me all the more certain that I need to seek out more modern offerings in this esteemed genre. In an age where rich men aspire to make the human animal obsolete as a productive, animated force, there is a certain transcendence to be located in our ability to destroy ourselves artfully.

I dunno how much more explicit I can make it. Go see it. Run. Don’t walk.

I rate this movie five Muay Thai Nightclubs out of five.