Hits Different
My thoughts on The Furious
Although the title might suggest otherwise, The Furious is not the latest installment in the increasingly bizarre action franchise that began with people boosting DVD players and eventually found them rocketing into outer space in retrofitted cars for reasons long lost in the mists of time. It is instead a martial arts film from Hong Kong that arrives in theaters with no small amount of buzz among fans of such things after playing at a number of genre-specific film festivals over the last few months. As someone who has seen more examples than he cares to recall of films hyped as the next big thing in action cinema only to prove to be anything but (unless you want to make some kind of case for the likes of Hardcore Harry or Guns Akimbo and I would prefer that you didn’t), I admit that as I sat down to see it, I may have felt a certain degree of cynicism regarding the possibility of it actually living up to the hype. Happily, not only does it manage to live up to its advanced word, it mostly exceeds those expectations by giving viewers a breathlessly and relentlessly exciting example of kick-ass (among other body parts) cinema that deserves to be compared with the likes of Mad Max: Fury Road and the John Wick films as instant modern action classic.
The storyline is so absurdly simple and direct that it could be sketched out on a matchbook cover with room left over for revisions. Following the death of his wife, mute handyman Wang Wei (Xie Miao) is trying to raise his daughter Rainy (Yang Enyou), who is just old enough to start chafing at his overprotective ways and his urging to take her martial arts training more seriously for her safety. One day, she is snatched off the streets by a gang of child traffickers and while he isn’t able to save her—though he certainly gives it his best shot—he manages to collect enough information to theoretically give the cops something to go on. Alas, the local police chief seems weirdly uninterested in doing anything in regards to this crime and so Wang decides to search for her himself.
Meanwhile, journalist Navin (Joe Taslim) is also looking into the trafficking ring in the hopes of finding his wife, who disappeared while doing her own investigation. At a combination night/MMA arena connected to the traffickers, Wang and Navin eventually cross paths while separately fighting off hordes of henchmen and when they do, they spend the next ten minutes or so pounding the crap out of each other, both believing the other to be one of the bad guys. Once all that is straightened out, they join forces to battle their way through the underworld in the hopes of finding their loved ones, snapping as many spines as necessary along the way.
Sure, the plotting is as predictable as can be—this is the standard one-man-against-an-army revenge saga that has been done hundreds of times before—but no one is going to a film like The Furious for the story nuances. That said, while the narrative most likely will not be winning awards anytime soon, it gives us just the right amount that a film like this requires. After seeing too many genre exercises that bog things down by trying too hard to create multi-layered universes and elaborate backstories, it is almost a relief to see one that is content to simply boil things down to the basic essentials in the manner of the lean narratives of Walter Hill. Likewise, the characters, with perhaps one exception, are not exactly complex or surprising but we get just enough to know who to cheer for and who to boo and the performances are just good enough during the occasional respites from the fighting to keep us interested in what happens to them.
No, what people are going to see a film like The Furious for are, of course, the big action setpieces and in that regard, it is an overwhelming success. You would think that nearly two solid hours of fight scenes might get a tad monotonous after while but director Tanigaki Kenji, stunt coordinator Sonomura Kensuke and what I suspect was a mammoth crew of stunt people and choreographers have made sure that this is not the case. Unlike so many action scenes these days, which utilize whiplash editing, camera tricks and CGI in order to help create the suggestion of excitement but more often than not coming up with visual sludge in which you can hardly tell who is fighting who or where they are in relation to each other, the fights here tend to favor wider shots that allow a more unobstructed vision of what is unfolding and edits that enhance rather than distract. The choreography is also impressive in the way that it often involves the combatants delivering complicated combinations of moves that flow into each other with a kind of balletic grace, particularly when our heroes are facing multiple attacks at the same time—this is not one of those Kung-fu films where the bad guys patiently wait to lunge at the good guys one at a time instead of just all ganging up on him at once. To pick a highlight amongst them all is almost impossible but I will say that the opening sequence I made reference to in which Wang tries to rescue his daughter—which starts with him chasing a speeding garbage truck in his bare feet and doing battle with everyone on board—would be the unquestioned breathless high point of most normal films in terms of staging, execution and the pure exhilaration it inspires. It might well be that here as well but as the film goes on, it gives that scene a lot of competition.
It is still relatively early in the summer movie season but if another movie comes along that manages to come even remotely close to supplying the kind of pure kinetic energy on display throughout The Furious, I would be very surprised. It contains some of the best action scenes I have seen in a long time and I think that more devoted connoisseurs of the genre will come away from it with a combined sense of amazement over the sights that they have just seen and astonishment over the fact that no one was apparently killed while creating them. Alas, after a few weeks of disappointing duds, The Furious has the bad luck to come out on the same weekend as Disclosure Day, a film that a.) has a slightly bigger promotional budget and b.) also happens to be really good. You should definitely see Disclosure Day, of course, but if you have even the slightest interest in action cinema, you will need to carve out time to see The Furious as well, if only to be able, a decade or so from now when its place in the pop cinema firmament has long been secured, to brag to others that you got to see it back in the day and on the big screen to boot.