The Furious opens in theaters June 12 from Lionsgate.
The fandom Mecca converging Asian film and action cinema continues to bustle and breathe new life in 2026, long after the resurgence of the Southeast Asian market with Indonesia making headway with its own talent pool. Things have become so propitious that it’s naturally difficult for fans to limit their aspirations or keep them fairly grounded enough that – and I say this somewhat facetiously – they’re probably still going to want a fourth installment of The Raid should pre-existing hype of a part three ever come to pass.
To add, it’s a moment that Kenji Tanigaki probably saw coming, having started directing well within the first half of his long career in stunts, and sharing collaborative spaces with stars like Yasuaki Kurata, Sonny Chiba, Donnie Yen, and Wesley Snipes to name only a few. As of late, he gets to tack on a handful of screen proponents for his latest endeavor, The Furious, backed by Bill Kong who shares both labels as producer and executive producer among the lot, and bolstering with promise from the moment Patrick Frater broke the news over at Variety more than two years ago.
Thus, the motion began – per Kong’s affirmation – to make a movie that “rocks the world” having accrued the likes of actors Xie Miao and Joe Taslim, along with Yayan Ruhian, Joey Iwanaga, Brian Le, and Jeeja Yanin for a pan-Asian roster of screenfighting talents spanning more than thirty years of excellence. Just how excellent? Well, look at any listicle or video essay of notable kung fu, wuxia, and other period and modern action film favorites with the aforementioned stars in attendance, and you’ll have scratched the surface.
Additionally, we have burgeoning star Yang Enyou (Dead To Rights) who reunites with Xie since appearing together in Yang Bingjia’s Eye For An Eye 2 (2022), with Taslim and Ruhian all but fated for the rematch fans have been pining over since doing the dance in Gareth Evans’ The Raid (2011). There’s also Iwanaga whose casting underscores a reteam with Tanigaki after Donnie Yen’s 2020 Hong Kong throwback nod, Enter The Fat Dragon, and Thai character actor Sahajak Boonthanakit who previously shared the set with Le on Chaya Supannarat’s Bangkok Dog and Gladiator Underground.
The abovementioned names here all lead the way for a story penned by a team of writers in Frank Hui, Lei Zhilong, Shum Kwan-Sin, and Mak Tin Shu, all of whom have written some of Hong Kong’s biggest releases of the past decade. As if the undertaking weren’t huge enough, however, leave it to Tanigaki to bring in Kensuke Sonomura, someone who has spent the better part of the last ten years tinkering at the helm and fleshing out some of the best martial arts fighting action fans have ever seen, namely at the latter end of a career thusfar of more than twenty years in stunts. In part, his work on the Baby Assassins trilogy and its interwoven single-season episodic, “Baby Assassins Everyday!,” is probably the biggest example (if not among the biggest) of Sonomura’s action-directing caliber, considering how well the titles have tracked since the first film, along with the popularity of its stars since.
Of course, galvanizing some of the most potent action stars to have at your convenience, and a team ready, willing and able to make your vision a reality are one thing. Delivering it is another, and at the risk of stating the obvious since the film began leaving its discernining impression on the festival masses since late last year, I’m inclined to build on the abbreviate posting that I was allowed to share upon my own private screening of the film back in April with a small press pool. You can take a gander at that by clicking here or on any of my available socials on the same day, and to that extent, I meant what I said.
Story points are relatively known and public as The Furious pertains to an unnamed Southeast Asian region where the life of a simple tradesman named Wang Wei (Xie), gets turned upside down upon witnessing the brutal kidnapping of his daughter, Rainy (Yang). Time is of the essence from this point on as Konggu’s desperate plea to the local police reveals an unwavering layer of bureaucracy and dismissal that albeit forces his hand, taking advantage of every clue he can spot to bring him closer to his daughter. A scuffle in a nightclub soon brings him face-to-face, fist-to-fist, and then some, with Navin (Taslim), a reporter working deep cover to find his wife, Matia (Yanin), who is first seen at the top of the film prowling the bleak inner halls of a criminal hermitage imprisoning children, and then fighting her way out before the scene cuts.
Their tête-à-tête ends with the realization that they’re on the same side, and a truce forms with both men teaming up – albeit on sometimes uneasy terms – to find their loved once before they’re migrated to new locations and lost forever in the city’s near-endless trafficking network. As word of their actions sends shockwaves throughout the city and a major middle man is punished, it’s only a matter of time before Paklung (Iwanaga), a young, prospective trafficking kingpin, and Tak (Ruhian), his devoted bow-and-arrow-wielding enforcer initiate their own mission of bloody and violent retribution.
By and large, The Furious guarantees a thriller with lead actors who are wholly capable of performing action on film in one capacity or several. The big picture here though, is the acting. Xie’s performance is written with a few modifiers that continually keep you peeled for how he reacts to different situations, whether they are with Rainy, or during action scenes. Additionally, some of those modifiers come with caveats that allude to an untold backstory that percolates things as we follow his character into the film. From the top of the film, you already get the sense that he knows how to fight, especially since he is building a training dummy for Rainy to practice on much to her own chagrin, and it’s only later into the film that The Furious pulls back the veil a little, contributing just enough to the intrigue of our protagonist, just to satiate viewers’ who may still be laterally focused on the “how’s” and “why’s” of it all.
Taslim brings vigor, veracity and vitality that coincides with this two-hander between the roles of Wang Wei and Navin, which is something you can expect for an actor who’s performed in multiple languages throughout his career, namely in Choi Jae-hoon’s The Swordsman and in Simon McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat. With Xie, Taslim invokes an earnest and youthful intensity, and even moments of levity and mutual camaraderie that provide the necessary equilibrium that levels out expectations of their craft apart from the action and spectacle, which is a given by now. It starts to feel like you’re watching a modest buddy flick after a while, and I’m here for that too.
Boonthanikit is fantastic as the first among the villains we meet on the forefront while the film explores several other antagonist figures in this dark and gruesome millieu, including Le who continues to be one of the most effortful actors working today – something he’s since exuded from his heyday as a founding member of indie action staple, Martial Club, to landing additional roles in landmark films like the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All At Once, and Bao Tran’s martial arts comedy, The Paper Tigers. Interestingly, he’s a little less gaudy compared to recent roles like in Bangkok Dog and his dick-chomping anti-hero in Gladiator Underground. Nonetheless, there’s ample depth to the role he gets to observe on camera, with a spacious-enough pallete for him to be in his element and give still his signature best and menacing on screen.
It’s equally fun seeing Le live up to the bar raised in part by the likes of Ruhian, an actor no one in the Western world saw coming on matters of action cinema infamy as a phenomenal villain. His character has a few lines throughout, and only needs as much given his screen presence and his character’s ferocity, which, additionally, goes hand in hand with that of co-star Iwanaga, someone who I’ve been fascinated with since my first year in journaling with a trailer for Dancing Karate Kid. Iwanaga is an absolute force to be reckoned with, something he’s shown time and again in the roles he’s played. While those performances were relegated to certain limits, The Furious, even after sharing a fight scene with Donnie Yen six years ago, feels like Iwanaga is finally getting the biggest stage he’s ever had, in quite possibly the biggest martial arts movie I’ve ever seen featuring an all-around cast of Asian film stars from multiple regions.
We’re now thirteen paragraphs into this review, and I can’t remember the last time I’ve written anything just as long for a new release, but I haven’t even begun talking about the action. The action is simply breathtaking, and I can’t even begin to do it justice by describing it as much, particularly since it’s the first thing that drops shortly after the film starts, and knowing that it’s the work of an action director whose resumé is the stuff of action cinema circles online if you share similar spaces.
Sonomura has a knack for taking scrappy, frenzied fight beats and actors’ own athletic experience (if applicable), and sharpenining, chiseling and framing them into high energy, expertly sequenced character moments that put our mains in harm’s way, throwing them into the fire as they battle villains from all corners. Body movements and techniques all have their purposes with our character, even when given an assortment of weapons to use from when hands and feet just won’t do, particularly with The Furious in all its elaborate set pieces. I’m talking small hammers, big hammers, combat boots, karaoke microphones, rusty cabinets, ice tombs, wooden cargo dividers, a bow and arrow, kukri blades, electricity, desks, ladders, bikes, bike parts, TEETH, even! Only a few characters around here use guns despite their proximity at times – not that this was an issue for me in the least.
The movie even has a few of the child characters getting in on the action at a few transitional moments, namely co-star Yang as she struggles to cope with her surroundings, ultimately before befriending her fellow captives and efforting to help them all escape despite the odds. Yang is amazing in this role here, between this, her screentime with Xie, and other aspects I’ve observed in her work which make her an outstanding artist to keep in mind in the years ahead, and be sure to look out for just exactly what occurs in the scene with her her on-screen father on a motorcycle. The scene is something right out of bygone era heroic bloodshed and it just rips.
(Norachai Kajchapanont/Courtesy of Lionsgate)
Culminating Tanigaki’s work here is a fight finale that serves exemplary to the creative reach that exec producer Kong signaled a few years ago. There are plenty of fight-heavy action films out there that level up really well in their delivery, but it is not often that you get a movie like The Furious with the characters we see, resulting in perhaps one of the biggest gatherings of voluninous talent we’ve seen share space on a set. It starts off relatively small in that what you see in the trailer is what you can surely expect, but don’t think for one second that Tanigaki, his writers, and Sonomura aren’t gonna close things out here without settling all the scores that matter.
The fight finale that awaits this movie is as action-packed as the adjective gets for something that’s as packed with action as this. Between the choreographic fluidity, intensity and ferocity of the action, stunts, and spectacle, and Flying Lotus’s energizing score, the final fight sequence between our main players is a perpetual melee of sensory overload. You’ll only get maybe one or two moments to breathe before you’re completely sucked into it, with no way out, and loving EVERY minute of it.
There’s at least one characteristic about some of the dialogue scenes (I’ll give it a single-digit percentage measure here as far as usage goes) which seemingly use a kind of dubbing to make just a few of the characters look like they’re speaking English. It’s there if you have a sharp enough ear and eye for it, particularly given the production setting and regional linguistics and accents, but the good news is that it’s use in the film’s core construction is so minimal that by the end of the film, you won’t really care. It effectively allows for The Furious to be the genuinely entertaining action thriller it strives to be, with a multitalented cast that can deliver the goods. Another issue is the film’s ending, which didn’t confuse me as much as it did a few of my fellow colleagues at the private screening that I attended at Tribeca here in New York City last month. For me, it worked just fine, and topped off a solid action flick from a staple in the genre who very clearly knows his stuff.
Plainly, and with no second thought to the matter, The Furious – like Xie Miao standing atop a pile of henchmen eager to get their asses hammered center-ring in a nighttime fight club – adds to the list of memorable Asian action films that test the limits of kinetic, stylish, bone-crushing, and kitchen sink-throwing martial arts-infused ultraviolence on a scale that hardly existed before The Raid, even with the nominal successes of Yen and Li, Chan, Chow and Yeoh. Similar themes explored films like Taken, The Man From Nowhere, Vietnamese actioner Furie, the Taslim-led The Night Comes For Us and Milla Jovovich’s Protector, and even Tony Jaa-starrer Striking Rescue, serve a terrain of familiarity for Tanigaki’s latest that still feels refreshing, even in many of its excesses.
Namely, any film that takes to task the most evil of auspices as what stands in the way between a protagonist and their resolve is a surefire concept. It helps, however, to have a director who can observe so many of those themes in a way that still proffers like something new and exciting, removing any concern over mundanity. Believe this when you look at someone like Tanigaki who, after more than two decades in the chair, now rises to the occasion as that director, and with a movie that effectively – and quite possibly – dwarfs whatever you last saw and thought was the action classic to beat.
Hell, you’re not wrong for thinking that what we saw in that first teaser clip we got last year of that inaugural footchase was the entirety of it (if you’ve been taking in all the bits and pieces of clips that have surfaced from numerous the promos and featurettes, you can surmise that it isn’t) and so to this end with The Furious, the team behind this amazing movie have done the imaginably impossible, and raised the bar for martial arts action cinema. They have affirmed their stake in the industry and met the moment accordingly, squaring action fans for the foreseeable future, and leaving an indelible mark on the genre forever with one simple question to future action filmmaking hopefuls: “Can you do better?!”…
…As somebody who platforms martial arts and action cinema on a daily basis here, always with eyes on the next action directing hopeful who believes they can answer this question promptly, this critic and enthusiast seconds that query
