Director: Kenji Tanigaki
Writers: Lei Zhilong, Shum Kwan-Sin, Frank Hui, Mak Tin-Shu
Stars: Xie Miao, Joe Taslim, Yayan Ruihan
Synopsis: A father fights fiercely against ruthless kidnappers to save his abducted daughter.
If you think that, while at the Toronto International Film Festival, I would not attend a screening of Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious, you would be wrong. You didn’t need to tell me anything else, but “directed by the choreographer of Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In.” Who cares if most of it is dubbed in ridiculously terrible English? As long as the action reaches just a fraction of Soi Cheang’s masterpiece, I would be a happy critic. And guess what? It not only reaches that fraction, but exceeds it. The Furious doesn’t possess the same action style as Twilight of the Warriors, nor does it need to. It still remains an exhilarating work of action art that pushes the genre forward in ways that few innovators of the form thought possible.
Imagine some of the splashiness of a Soi Cheang picture, with the intricacies of Lau Kar-leung and Tsui Hark choreographies (with a dash of Corey Yuen in the mix), and you’ve got The Furious. It doesn’t have the same sense of heightened fantasy as Twilight of the Warriors, but it doesn’t matter. The action is more driven by the body’s relentless pursuit of justice than anything else, and the limits it attains as it fights against itself – and multiple subhuman individuals – to achieve its goals. In that regard, protagonist Wang Wei (Xie Miao) will not rest until he has found the people who have kidnapped his daughter, Rainy (Yang Enyou), even if his body has taken a massive toll.
The film explores how far a body can go before it reaches its breaking point. Some of it isn’t realistic, but who cares? It’s all about innovation, and Tanigaki is in the pantheon of the most incredible action artists working today. The movie has it all: bare-knuckled one-on-one fights of immense power versus Xie Miao and Joe Taslim, lengthy chases that can teeter from highly comedic to intensely dramatic, bloody brawls where hammers are the focal point of attention, and arrow-fu, involving The Raid’s Yayan Ruihan stealing the show in the film’s relentless climax.
Many will say the action in The Furious is unlike anything they’d ever seen, and I wouldn’t oppose this viewpoint at all, but there are explicit references to what the landscape – past and present – has done before. One fight recalls a particular sequence from Corey Yuen’s Fong Sai Yuk, while others bear the imprints of Kensuke Sonomura all over them. And whaddaya know? Tanigaki handpicked the Baby Assassins genius to help him choreograph the bevy of set pieces you see in this frequently jaw-dropping movie. All of the comedic beats are decidedly his, while some of the more fantastical ones definitely feel more in line with Tanigaki’s sensibilities, especially as someone who has worked with prominent genre filmmakers such as Soi Cheang and Johnnie To.
There’s this incredible confrontation occurring at the midpoint of the picture between the protagonist, Navin (Joe Taslim), and a henchman (played by Brian Le, better known as the buttplug guy from Everything Everywhere All at Once) that feels like a true mélange of action styles that only the combined powers of Tanigaki and Sonomura can deliver. The body is a vehicle of motion, yes, but also a vessel of pure emotion. Action is, after all, the most potent form of emotional catharsis you can convey on the screen. The sequence shows just how far they will go in delivering on that promise in a frequently funny, but surprisingly poignant marriage of style and power, where motion becomes emotion. It’s tricky to do, but Sonomura can convey this so effortlessly through his choreographies that he’s essentially become this generation’s Lau Kar-leung.
It then becomes relatively simple to be hooked on the hypnotizing action of the picture, even if the English-language dubbing is, at times, baffling. But what if I told you this is part of the charm? After all, TIFF is known for presenting some of the most unique genre offerings you’ll ever see through their Midnight Madness catalogue. As far as I’m concerned, and in this exclusive case only, dubbing adds to the pleasure of seeing a genre film with a large audience. I’ll talk about the problems dubbing brings to films another time, but it seems to be the only way to enjoy the often cheesy fun of a movie like The Furious, which seems scientifically engineered to be experienced on the biggest possible screen with the rowdiest possible crowd.
One didn’t even need to attend the screening at midnight to see precisely how rowdy a crowd would get, because the 2:45 pm press and industry screening was just as exhilarating as any midnight screening I attended in my life. And you know it’s about to be something special when journalists who usually try to keep their cool at press screenings react so loudly at the movie’s most surprising (and highly comedic) moments. It’s the sign that you’re watching a film bound to stand the test of time and find an audience when it eventually reaches cinemas or viewing platforms around the world, and if you’re not on the Kensuke Sonomura or Kenji Tanigaki train, get on it now before The Furious sweeps the world!
