Let’s get this out of the way: No, The Furious is not the tenth and final mainline entry in the Fast and Furious series. That’s still holding in development hell. What we’ve got here is a (mostly) English-language action film out of Hong Kong, notably starring Joe Taslim (the erstwhile Bi-Han himself) and Yayan Ruhian (one of Asia’s foremost action stars ever since The Raid). And the film was directed by Kenji Tanigaki, who comes with a long and respectable list of stunt coordinator credits on both sides of the Pacific.
Also, the film has four credited writers. Fuck if I know what they were doing here.
We lay our scene in Southeast Asia, where droves of children have gone missing as they get kidnapped by a ruthless human trafficking ring. And of course the police are no help, because they’re cowardly, incompetent, on the take, or some combination of all three. Enter Matia (Jeeja Yanin), an investigative journalist and martial arts badass who goes undercover to try and expose this criminal empire. Until she goes missing.
Taslim plays Navin, Matia’s husband and work partner, who picks up the story to try and find his wife. Meanwhile, Xie Miao plays Wang Wei, a mute handyman with an enigmatic backstory we never learn about. And he’s perfectly happy to mind his own business until his young daughter (Rainy, played by Yang Enyou) gets snatched off the street. Thus we have our two martial arts badasses on a quest to bring down the bad guys and find their respective loved ones. Navin is the guy who favors the stealthier and more strategic approach, while Wang Wei prefers to simply barge in swinging.
I already hate writing this review because I’m left with basically nothing to write about. The premise is laughably thin. The plot barely exists. The themes of revenge and courage and justice are all threadbare. The characters are all two-dimensional at best. The female characters only exist to be fridged and/or threatened to motivate the male protagonists, though it certainly helps that Rainy and Matia each do their best to be proactive with what little screentime they have.
And nobody cares. Because this is an action flick out of Hong Kong. We didn’t come here for the story. We came here to see stunts and fight scenes and acrobatics that shouldn’t be humanly possible.
Indeed, there were so many mind-blowing action set pieces in this picture that it somehow got boring after a while. There came a point when I simply got dizzy, watching so many different people and body parts spinning around. I distinctly remember one fight scene when I was practically shouting at the main characters “The rifle’s right there, grab it and shoot the guy already!” And I could swear I heard the filmmakers shouting back “No, that would be cheating!”
Granted, this kind of movie always comes with some measure of suspending disbelief. But most of the time (in a modern action flick, anyway), when an action hero pulls off some impossible stunt that would liquefy anyone else, the filmmakers are always careful to make it look just painful enough to sell it. And there’s always an implied upper limit as to how much damage that character can take. Those limits do not exist here. We’re not talking John Wick or Ethan Hunt or Dom Toretto, we’re talking Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. Even the lowliest thug in this picture is on par with any iteration of Ghostface. Hell, the heavy played by Brian Le is practically a mutant — and not a “Leatherface” mutant, a goddamn “X-Men villain” mutant!
And it’s not like the film has much in the way of gimmicks. They’re not fighting each other with exotic weapons (except for Ruhian’s character, fighting with a bow and arrows), and they’re not fighting in any strange or interesting locations (except for one scene in an ice factory). By the time of that blood-soaked climax, I wasn’t on the edge of my seat to see what would happen or who would win. I wanted to see what it would finally take to kill these sons of bitches!
Luckily, the film does have one secret weapon: The kids. Of course Rainy doesn’t have the skill or the muscle to fight a grown man on her own — at least the film’s kind of madness doesn’t go that far. Even so, when Rainy is given the least bit of opportunity to advance the plot or support the other characters, she’ll do so in neatly surprising ways. There’s also a young boy (I’m sorry I can’t confirm the character’s name or actor) who got traumatized and terrorized into working on behalf of his captors. He’s one of the precious few characters in this movie to get a development arc, and it’s genuinely satisfying to watch.
Ultimately, I’m sorry to say that I can’t bring myself to recommend The Furious. No, it’s not a bad movie. This is a film that knows exactly what it wants to be, makes no apology for it, and pulls out all the stops trying and succeeding to be precisely that. And I respect that. The big problem I have here is that the film has basically nothing to offer aside from the fight scenes. And sure, the fight scenes are awesome right now, but what happens when the novelty wears off? There’s no deeper world worth exploring, no characters worth coming back to, no huge innovations in terms of plot or premise or themes. Hell, even the action scenes are all kinda one-note, up until the climax.
Sure, the film is worth a watch if you’re into that kind of straightforward action flick. But I seriously doubt it’s going to hold up after a second or third viewing.