{"id":727547,"date":"2026-06-10T13:29:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T13:29:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/727547\/"},"modified":"2026-06-10T13:29:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T13:29:11","slug":"relentless-and-breathless-action-epic-the-furious-treats-carnage-with-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/727547\/","title":{"rendered":"Relentless and breathless action epic The Furious treats carnage with care"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

The Furious, directed by Kenji Tanigaki, stars Xie Miao, Joe Taslim and Yayan Ruhian.Lionsgate\/Supplied<\/p>\n

The Furious<\/p>\n

Directed by Kenji Tanigaki <\/p>\n

Written by Mak Tin-shu, Lei Zhilong, Shum Kwan-sin and Frank Hui<\/p>\n

Starring Xie Miao, Joe Taslim and Yayan Ruhian <\/p>\n

Classification 14A; 113 minutes<\/p>\n

Opens in theatres June 12 <\/p>\n

Critic\u2019s Pick <\/p>\n

There are enough holy-mother-of-god moments in the new martial-arts extravaganza The Furious during which your brain will melt so rapidly you\u2019ll have to wipe your shirt of any grey matter seeping through your ears. For me, it was the third-act sequence involving a fight with bicycles. Not on bikes, but with them. <\/p>\n

The wonderfully brutal thing about The Furious, though, is that every other action-movie freak will find their own particular instance of unprecedented sucker-punch absurdity within the film. It is almost as if director Kenji Tanigaki, a veteran of the Hong Kong stunt scene, has taken every single back-breaking movie he has ever worked on and compressed that cumulative knowledge and pain into one breathless, exhaustive feature. You will leave The Furious bloodied and bruised, but ready to go a second round before you can tend to any wound.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

The film opens in theatres on June 12.Lionsgate\/Supplied<\/p>\n

Taking its action cues from the two most elaborately punishing films of the past decade and a half \u2013 Gareth Evans\u2019s 2014 masterpiece The Raid 2<\/a> and Timo Tjahjanto\u2019s 2018 epic The Night Comes for Us<\/a> \u2013 The Furious constantly seeks to one-up itself when it comes to its big-screen blowouts. It is simply impossible to predict how Tanigaki will manipulate the bodies of his cast from one sequence to the next, let alone how the director and his stunt team manage to keep everyone involved from winding up in the real-life morgue. <\/p>\n

If any crew member was to end up on a cold slab of metal, though, they might find the corpse of at least one of the four credited screenwriters, considering how deathly dull the screenplay can be. While The Raid 2 established a dense mythology of Jakarta cops and crooks, and The Night Comes for Us revolved around a plot so stupidly surreal that it at least raised an eyebrow or two, The Furious is an exceedingly simple tale of a one-man army. <\/p>\n

Set \u201csomewhere in Southeast Asia,\u201d as the film\u2019s opening credits inform us, the film follows a mute handyman and single father named Wei (Miao), whose young daughter (Yang Enyou) is randomly abducted by a group of snarly human traffickers. Determined to find his child before she\u2019s shipped off to god knows where, Wei blazes a path through the criminal underworld, getting some help from an extremely athletic journalist, Navin (Joe Taslim), along the way. <\/p>\n

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That\u2019s it \u2013 that\u2019s the entire plot of the film. Sure, there are some narrative diversions mixed in, such as one focusing on the internecine war for power among the criminal cartels, but The Furious is mostly two hours of watching Xie and Taslim (the latter a veteran of both the Raid films and The Night Comes for Us) pummel and kick and dismember a thousand anonymous henchmen in rapid succession. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

The film constantly seeks to one-up itself when it comes to its big-screen blowouts.Lionsgate\/Supplied<\/p>\n

For some, such relentless violence might sound like the exact opposite of fun \u2013 but I also have a sense that anyone who might feel that way stopped reading this review long ago. So for those who have stuck around and can appreciate the creativity of on-screen carnage, just know that Tanigaki, with the assistance and care of stunt expert Kensuke Sonomura, stages one beautifully intricate fight scene after another. This is violence as high art, blending the balletic comedy of Corey Yuen (The Legend) with the hardcore crunch of Lau Kar-leung (The 36th Chamber of Shaolin), all of it splattered with the blood of Indonesia\u2019s reigning action titans Evans and Tjahjanto.<\/p>\n

Sure, the disjointed English dubbing undermines the film\u2019s many technical achievements, and the decision to set the film somewhere that is in fact nowhere \u2013 the better to appeal to as many markets as possible, I suppose \u2013 is needlessly frustrating. But once that bicycle scene arrives, or really once any battle begins, any filmmaking missteps are immediately forgiven. <\/p>\n

There is simply no point in ever being mad at The Furious \u2013 it\u2019ll knock your teeth out sooner or later, and you\u2019ll thank the movie for such a blow, even if you can barely croak out a sound.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: The Furious, directed by Kenji Tanigaki, stars Xie Miao, Joe Taslim and Yayan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":727548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,42729,75,17262,337,2922],"class_list":["post-727547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-criticspick","tag-entertainment","tag-film-review","tag-movies","tag-noastack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=727547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/727548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=727547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=727547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=727547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}