Dallas Film Now.

Xie Miao and Joe Taslim star in director Kenji Tanigaki’s brutal action thriller. 

Unflinching in its brutality, The Furious is fueled by righteous desperation. 

After an angry spat with her mute, widowed father (Xie Miao, who first gained fame as Jet Li’s son in The New Legend of Shaolin, 1994), motherless young Rainy (Yang Enyou) races out of a hair salon, falls prey to a young boy’s desperate plea for help, and is promptly kidnapped. 

Bagged and hurled onto a flatbed truck like a sack of potatoes, the truck races off, with her father in desperate, barefoot pursuit. His best fighting efforts against the criminals, with bodies, fists, and legs careening wildly to match the truck’s bucking motions, are thwarted when he is struck by an automobile. 

Racing to the closest police station, the Chinese Mute, as he comes to be called, finds his efforts to report the crime and enlist the help of the police are downplayed by those who are meant to protect and serve the public. Told to wait, the Chinese Mute refuses to do so. If the police won’t help, he will take it upon himself to find the kidnappers and rescue his beloved daughter. 

He follows up a clue to a crowded nightclub / fight club. Spying members of the kidnap crew, including the baldheaded Ho (Brian Le), he begin fighting through the crowd and the club owner’s army of minions, finally encountering a sympathetic ally in Navin (Joe Taslim, The Raid, 2011), who is at the club in search of clues to find his wife, a journalist who went missing. Together, they search with increasing desperation for their missing loved ones, knowing that every second counts. 

Background is sparingly supplied piecemeal. The criminal gang that snatched the Chinese Mute’s daughter, and was being investigated by Navin’s wife, is fronted by the slick-suited Paklung (Joey Iwanaga, Enter the Fat Dragon, 2020), supported by deadly archer Tak (Yayan Ruhian, The Raid, 2011), who shot an arrow through the head of a child in the opening sequence, firmly establishing the gang’s ruthless, merciless modus operandi. Perhaps unknown to his overlords, Paklung has focused his gang’s efforts on stealing children with the intent to sell them. 

Directed by Kenji Tanigaki (Enter the Fat Dragon, 2020) with fluid intensity, The Furious fuses the plot and the action scenes seamlessly. They are one and the same, with the action arising in every location that the Chinese Mute and Navin visit in their search for their loved ones. Every fight that erupts is different, depending on the location and the objects that happen to be there, which include but are not limited to furniture, blocks of ice, concrete blocks, and sledgehammers. 

Every location simultaneously feels like a claustrophic trap; even if it’s multi-leveled, it’s a dark, heavily-shadowed labyrinth that the protagonists must figure out how to escape, even as they battle multiple layers of armed assailants. In this, it reminds of Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024), on which Kenji Tanigaki served as action designer; the battles continue, one after another, paced with relentless fury. 

Indeed, the action becomes so intense that I never wanted to look away. When The Furious reaches its conclusion, it felt like a reminder that it’s okay to breathe. Now. 

The film opens Friday, June 12, in select area theaters, via Lionsgate.  For more information about the film, visit its official site.