‘The Furious’ Review: Ultra-Violent Action Epic More Than Lives Up to the Title

I’m sitting down to write this exactly two hours after witnessing Kenji Tanigaki’s pummeling beat ‘em up, The Furious… and I’m still sweating. With his latest, the filmmaker delivers a brutal, bloody, high-octane action film that consistently throws the viewer through a wall and asks, “Want some more?” My answer each time was a resounding “Hell yes”. It’s one of the best martial arts films that I’ve seen in years, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

Mysterious mute repairman, Wang Wei (Miao Xie), is distraught after his daughter, Rainy (Enyou Yang), is taken during a string of child kidnappings that have occurred around the city. In his mission to find her, he encounters Navin (Joe Taslim), a man searching for his wife, a journalist, who disappeared while investigating the missing children. Together, the two men will stop at nothing to find their loved ones, even if it means having to fight their way through an entire ring of child traffickers. The violent villains have no idea what’s about to come their way, because the pair of men are furious.

True to the title, Tanigaki’s latest taps into a contemporary rage felt around the world in the wake of the Epstein files. In dealing with child traffickers, the film makes no qualms about shining an unflinching light on the horrors happening to kids under the shadowy protection of wealthy men. Within seconds of its opening, we hear the screams of a tortured child, followed by a rescue attempt that becomes a dizzying display of hand-to-hand combat before reminding us that the good guys don’t always win. In The Furious, kids are beaten. They’re thrown through the air in garbage bags, nothing more than disposable to their kidnappers. Some even die. Thankfully, none of that reaches an unwatchable point of graphic gratuitousness, but it’s enough to make you want to curb-stomp the villains of the film yourself.