The Furious is a stunning showcase of martial arts excellence

Essentially the martial arts movie version of a musical supergroup, The Furious had mighty expectations to live up to. Previous efforts at an international all-star martial arts movie have fallen short, but The Furious shatters the ceiling, delivering an exhilarating, non-stop thrill ride with the best fight scenes I’ve seen in years. Other great action films this decade might be more complete, but The Furious delivers the martial arts action you would hope for from this unbelievable lineup of talent.

The premise is simple: A mute handyman (Xie Miao) teams up with the husband (Joe Taslim) of a missing journalist (Jeeja Yanin) to rescue his daughter from a child trafficking ring. It’s a light excuse for as much ass-kicking as possible, and boy does The Furious kick those asses, supported by two of the foremost action choreographers working today: director Kenji Tanigaki and action director Kensuke Sonomura. Tanigaki is best known for his many collaborations with Donnie Yen (including SPL, Flash Point, Blade II, and Dragon) as well as his work on the live-action Rurouni Kenshin movies and the excellent 2024 Hong Kong actioner Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In. Sonomura – my personal favorite of the many skilled fight choreographers working today – burst onto the scene with his thrilling work on the Baby Assassins series and Ghost Killer.

Then there’s the star-studded cast. Lead Xie Miao is a former wushu champion who starred alongside Jet Li and Chow Yun-fat as a child actor in ‘90s kung fu movies. Joe Taslim is a three-time medalist at the Southeast Asian Games as a member of Indonesia’s national judo team, and a martial arts star known for The Raid, The Night Comes for Us, and the new Mortal Kombat movies. Brian Le is a Vietnamese-American martial artist and choreographer who first emerged as a part of the YouTube collective Martial Club before roles in The Paper Tigers, Shang-Chi, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. Yayan Ruhian is an Indonesian martial artist and master of pencak silat best known for his role as Mad Dog in The Raid. Jeeja Yanin is a Thai Muay Thai specialist best known for leading the 2008 martial arts film Chocolate. Joey Iwanaga is a Japanese martial artist best known for his work in Baby Assassins 2. The cast is a Pan-Asian celebration of martial arts excellence, from a variety of styles and nations, and it gives The Furious’s action a distinct feel and energy.

The fights are relentless, brutal, and creative, successfully combining the styles of the twin visionaries behind the camera. Sonomura brings his unique style of choreography and movement to this world, continuing to break new ground in vertical and horizontal movement amidst busy choreography – people going under objects, over objects, on top of people, under people in the midst of busy fight scenes, or the classic Sonomura sequence of a character quickly strafing while fighting. All this spinning, rolling choreography on the go is supported by Tanigaki’s clinical eye for action: He does a phenomenal job tracking the various bodies and limbs being flung across the screen and creating a clarity of movement and objectives (micro moments like props people want to grab, things at stake) within the fights. It’s shocking how clear the fights are for how busy they are, and The Furious’s action pulls off one of the greatest feats a fighting movie can: The fights feel improvised when they of course are not. They’re the kind of fights that make me yearn for the physical release of the movie, so I can slow the moments down, rewind repeatedly, and watch all the intricate details again and again.

The variety of martial arts on display is one of The Furious’s best tools, and Tanigaki and Sonomura use the superhuman cast to their full extent. Xie Miao has graduated from child star to DTV action star to blockbuster action lead in The Furious, and gives an excellent performance. His wushu movements are frame-perfect and precise, creating aesthetically pleasing forms, and he handles himself with confidence and determination whether fighting or not. This creates a palpable link between how his character carries himself and how he fights, a key element of any martial arts movie worth its salt. By contrast, Taslim’s fighting is desperate and appealingly messy, matching his character’s long search for his missing wife.

But for all the decorated martial artists in this movie – Xie Miao, Taslim, Yayan Ruhian showing off new brutal ways to fight with a bow, Jeeja Yanin delivering a killer opening fight, Joey Iwanaga’s smooth kicks – it’s American former YouTuber Brian Le who steals the show. 

Hollywood action directors, take note: If you want a quick cheat to make sure the movement and fighting styles in your action movie are varied, just hire Le. No one else on earth moves or fights like this man. He embodies animalistic movements in ways that feel fierce and real, and his style is unreplicable. He’s spoken about his inspiration for this performance, comparing his character’s fighting style to that of a baby or Donkey Kong. (“Within Super Smash Bros., there are always characters fighting, and Donkey Kong just comes in and annoys everybody and just beats the crap out of everybody. So, I remember thinking, ‘Ok. I’m going to exist as Donkey Kong.’”) I came into this movie a fan of Le’s, but thinking I was grading him on a YouTube curve. The Furious confirms he is the real deal. In a movie full of decorated stars and incredible martial artists, he is somehow the one who stands out the most. He’s like a human cheat code for distinctive and interesting fight choreography, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him whenever he was on screen.

The human trafficking trope is a tired one in action cinema, and one that has been exploited by bad actors to foment fears against immigrants, strangers, and the other ever since John “Special Set of Skills” Taken’s daughter was kidnapped on a European trip. The Furious does not wade into that territory – the Pan-Asian cast helps undercut insinuations about any particular group of people – and the movie’s focus is more on corruption, featuring perhaps the most blatantly corrupt police captain ever depicted. The kidnapped daughter is also a real character in the movie, not just a plot point. She’s braver and more inclined to stand up for what’s right than her father, and even gets involved in some of the action sequences.

The biggest problem for The Furious is some very iffy visual dubbing. There’s a long history of awkward audio dubbing in martial arts movies, and for an international production like this, there’s a built-in expectation that things might not always match. But the film seems to use some form of effects-based dubbing, changing the mouth movements of some of the actors to fit the English the character is speaking. That results in some extremely awkward editing, where the camera repeatedly cuts away from people talking so we don’t have to linger on the effect. With such an international cast, it seems like it would have been much better to just fully lean into the variety of languages on display and trust the audience to dismiss any anachronisms. Instead, there is way too much English in the movie from actors who are clearly not too comfortable with it. International movies and TV have never been more popular with American audiences, and more productions should trust that Americans are willing to follow something with little to no English in it.

The Furious was billed as a martial arts extravaganza from some of the most talented choreographers and martial artists working today, and it undoubtedly lives up to that billing. It’s not as complete of an action film as the greats of the 2020s (like Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In or the Baby Assassins movies) – it lacks the thematic coherence, character depth, and over-arching visual language the very best bring – but it can’t be beaten when it comes to the ambition and execution of its fight sequences. For fans of martial arts movies, it’s an absolute can’t-miss event that signals a new era in on-screen fighting.