The Best Action Movie of the Year Has Arrived

What's up guys, Keener Corner here. I didn't mean to make two videos reviewing new movies back to back, but in addition to Disclosure Day, I went and saw The Furious this weekend and I just had to make a quick video on this as soon as I could to get all of you to go see the movie. After this video, I'll be back to making more classic kinds of videos, so be on the lookout for those in the coming days. After finishing my video on Hong Kong cinema, I was definitely in the mood for some more martial arts action films and I saw that The Furious was getting rave reviews, so I got a ticket and went in completely blind. I was not prepared for what I experienced over the next two hours. The setup and story are about as simple as you could possibly make one, because the story here barely matters. It's just there to act as a vehicle for all the extended fight sequences. A Chinese mute, played by Miao Jie, lives with his daughter in Southeast Asia and he works as a handyman. We spend a few minutes watching their fairly everyday life, but we get the sense that he's pretty good at martial arts and that he's training his daughter to defend herself. Then, one day, these bad guy human traffickers kidnap his daughter and let's just say that they'll quickly come to regret messing with the mute. Then there's Naveen, played by Joe Taslim, whose wife was a reporter investigating this same criminal ring and went missing. The film opens up with her in the heart of darkness and it's brutal. Her opening was actually cut in the Chinese version of the movie. Actually, after looking into it, a lot of stuff was cut and or altered in that release, and the filmmakers put in a clip at the end about the Chinese fighting child exploitation and then slowed the credits roll down significantly so that it would match the running time of the international cut of the film. Anyways, the mute is on a mission to save his daughter, and that mission coincides with Naveen trying to save his wife. They find each other at a boxing match, and after fighting each other for a while, realize that they're on the same side, and they team up to burn the whole operation to the ground. That's the story. Our heroes are good guys, and the villains are really evil. So evil that we'll cheer when they get brutally beaten. There is a little character development of Naveen, but almost none for the mute. Since he's mute, he never talks in the film, but he does say a few things in sign language, though nothing he says tells us any backstory about him. In fact, the movie is kind of tongue in cheek with this lack of characterization of him. Some cops wonder what his background is, asking if maybe he's a convict on the run. When asked who he is, he signs back that he's just a father. And then there's a scene where it seems like he's about to explain his backstory, and the movie just cuts. It doesn't matter where he comes from, and that air of mystery adds to the action and to the movie, and it makes him like an Asian man with no name character. All that matters is that he's an angry father who can kick ass. The Furious, to me, feels like it's in the same category of action movies as the Raid films. And not only because it has some of the same actors from the Raid in its cast, with Joe Taslim and Ya-Yan Ruyan both starring in the Raid as well as the Furious. What I mean is that both films understand that the best kind of action movies are musicals. These are Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly movies where the dance moves happen to result in broken bones, gouged out eyes, and lots of spilled blood. What the director Kenji Tanigaki achieves here is a superb film that synthesizes so many fighting styles in a seamless way. Miao Jia practices Wushu, Joe Taslim Judo, Joey Iwanaga Taekwondo, Ya-Yan Ruyan Penchak Salat, and Brian Lay fights with a mix of different fighting styles as he's self-taught. In lesser hands, the different styles would clash. But here, they make for highly dynamic fights, with the characters' fighting styles and choice of weapons working as a way to make them distinct and highlight their various character traits during the fights. But let me tell you, the moves and the acrobatics involved in this film had my jaw on the floor. You can tell that this movie was made by someone with a background in action choreography as it's all impeccable here. There are things I saw in this movie that I never thought I would see on the screen. There's one fight where the Mute is fighting all these guys at once and they're all trying to grab him causing this small mountain of men to form beneath him and he just takes out a hammer and starts beating them, crushing their bones. But that's not even the craziest fight in the film. The final fight goes on for something like 20 minutes and it feels like a short film of its own. I mean, the director said that that final fight alone took 18 days to shoot and I believe him. It was crazy. I don't know how some of that stuff is even possible. What's crazy too is that the big stunts are shown in wides. They're not using close ups and edits to hide the action. Apart from the god tier choreography, the fights work so well because they all have their own narrative structure. There are three acts to every fight sequence, with the action itself telling the story. The movie also sort of felt like a video game to me. Each new location was like an action sandbox for the two leads and every time they went to a new arena, they'd be mostly healed from the last one. Each location also has its own version of a boss fight, with the hardest boss being saved for the ending of the film. Oh, and in the last fight, there's a shot that felt like it was leaning into this video game aspect of it. We've got the two good guys on one side of the frame and two of the bad guys on the other side of the frame and they all strike a pose. It felt like I was about to watch a street fighter match. That is something to know about this movie going in. It's not aiming for realism. Every character can take a serious beating. Would a lot of stuff kill or incapacitate them pretty quickly in real life? Yeah. But does increasing their HP allow for cooler fights? Yeah. And in this movie, the rule of cool wins every time. There's also this guy in this movie, played by Brian Lay, who is like seemingly invincible and has more strength than any human should. And without spoiling it, something that happens with his character made everybody in my audience either gasp or yell out something like, oh ----. Well, a lot of things happened that made people I was watching the film with involuntarily verbally react, which proved to me that this was the most effective action movie I've seen in the theater since The Raid. When I judge a movie, I'm judging it based on what it sets out to do and how effectively it does that. Tanigaki isn't trying to make a Birdman movie. He set out to make an adrenaline-fueled martial arts beat-em-up and he succeeded with flying colors. What I like about the action in this too is that for as skilled as good guys are, they're up against people who are just as good as them. We hardly ever feel like the heroes are untouchable and there's real weight and crunch to the fights. So many other action movies forget that the heroes need to take a considerable beating and that we need to feel like they're always on the brink of death if we're, as an audience, going to feel the tension of the fight. All the fights in The Furious are tense and there's only so much I can say about them. You're going to just have to experience it yourself. It's a movie where words can only do it so much justice. It needs to be seen to be believed. I think though that the highest praise I can give to this movie is that right after watching it, I wanted to see the other movies that Tanigaki worked on and the other films that these actors starred in. Leading me to seeing the film Twilight of the Warriors walled in, which takes place in the Kowloon walled city and stars one of my favorite martial arts actors, Sammo Hung. The Furious opened my eyes to a lot of cool action films that I had never heard of and I'm seeing people on social media sharing all their favorite movies that are somehow connected to The Furious. It's fun and heartwarming that this movie has triggered a community response this positive. As a final thought, I'll say that if films were eligible for the Stunts Oscars this year, The Furious would easily be the frontrunner. The coordination, choreography, and performances are all masterclass stuff and I can't wait to see what other films this team comes out with next. And I'd be remiss if I didn't shout out the action director Kensuke Sanomura. If you want to learn about Sanomura, I've put a pretty great article that I found about his history and style in the description below. I know I'll be buying this when it gets a physical release, if it does, and I might even go back to the theaters to see it again because I don't think one watch is enough. I want more. I've been the Kino Corner and I will see you all in the next video.