There are many movies about kidnappers who choose Not that girl to kidnap (e.g. Man on Fire, The Searchers, Saving Silverman), but none of the kidnappers in those films made such a poor choice as the child traffickers in Kenji Tanigaki's Fury, who snatch a trafficker's daughter right off the street and then pay for their audacity by having them literally beaten half to death throughout an action movie so brutal it makes The Raid look like Paddington. (Okay, maybe that's a bit of a stretch, but it was fun to write.)
This doesn't mean that Tanigaki's senseless symphony of blood and skull-smashing is necessarily bloodier, than any of the recent martial arts films it's trying to outdo (though it There is It's not that it's one of the most cold-blooded decapitations you've ever seen on screen, but rather that its frenetic ultraviolence is staged with such vision and variety that each of its 9,349,082.5 hammer blows to the head hits with the same force as the first. "Fury" is too sloppy to stand alongside the true masterpieces of its genre, but it evolves alongside the best, drawing inspiration from a variety of styles and traditions to create a fresh and unpredictable fighting game that never lets you freeze.
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Directed by the Japanese filmmaker behind Enter the Fat Dragon, with a screenplay by four Hong Kong writers (Mak Ting-shu, Lei Zhi-long, Shum Kwang-sing, and Frank Hui), and filmed on the streets of Bangkok, Thailand, Fury immediately establishes itself as a martial arts flick—to the detriment of everything else. The amusingly vague opening credits begin with the words "Somewhere in Southeast Asia," ushering in a relentless hodgepodge of characters, some speaking Mandarin, some Tagalog, some English, and some terribly duplicated English, the main character at all does not speak, and everyone understands each other in a universal language, like a lead pipe pierced to the bone.
In general, as we have already written, someone is kidnapping children on the streets some place , and everyone who goes looking for them never shows up again. The latest adult to go missing is journalist Matia (Thai action star Jija Yanin), who is shot in the head with an arrow by The Raid icon Yayan Ruhian (another iconic role, this time as a bow-wielding maniac who never changes out of his tracksuit from The Royal Tenenbaums). This doesn't please Matia's husband and colleague, Navin (the indomitable Joe Taslim, also from The Raid), who goes undercover in the ruthless criminal underworld of Somewhere to find out what happened to her.
But Navin won't have to do it alone. Meet Wang Wei (Chinese wushu champion and "New Legend of Shaolin" star Xie Miao), a nonverbal salesman whose talents for catching hammers, sensing villains, and running 100 miles per hour in flip-flops suggest he might have a secret history of murder. "Fury" doesn't disprove that notion, but—inexplicably—it doesn't develop it further either. I suppose that's typical of a film where even ordinary reporters are unstoppable killing machines, but this causes several haunting questions arise as our hero transforms into a Jet Li-level fighter after gangsters kidnap his daughter Rainey (Yang Enyu) to fulfill their human trafficking quotas.
Van and Navin soon run into each other while trying to break into the same nightclub (which, like all great nightclubs, has a working MMA cage in the middle of the dance floor), but by the time they form their fateful alliance, Fast & Furious is already firing on all cylinders. The opening scene, where Van pursues the kidnappers who stole Rainey, is a brutal showcase of what the film does best: Van takes on a towering street fighter and a 250-pound baby (stuntman Brian Le, of Everywhere fame, as the sweet but dim-witted "son" of a local crime boss) in a frenetic brawl on the flatbed of a truck. Like all the film's most spectacular scenes, of which there are many, this brawl is a frenetic mix of different fighting styles that collide like concrete blocks, creating something subtly new.
Wang favors Chinese martial arts, and his early opponents lean toward a combination of pencak silat and muay thai (with a dash of Eddie Gordo-style capoeira), but Fury is too chaotic to pit these styles against each other with the formality of a Shaw Brothers classic. Instead, Tanigaki and fight choreographer Kensuke Sonomura (The Little Assassins) allow them to operate with a cartoonish abandon that's best displayed in a later skirmish where Wang and Navin team up to take on Le's character inside an industrial freezer, with the three of them battling it out—and sometimes and with — fresh corpses, completely encased in giant blocks of ice. It's the perfect setting for an action movie, where the camerawork is always a little too slippery and the choreography anarchic enough that the chaos feels more like a virtue than a flaw.
Fury, a film replete with props and constantly ironic for a film about the trafficking of small children (the script has occasional flashes of self-seriousness, but Tanigaki never forgets that he's making a film taken to the point of absurdity), generally balances well between the farcical madness of Jackie Chan and the more brutal cruelty of his followers. At one point, Wan is struck by a speeding car, which would be funny if it weren't so incredibly painful.
In this particular instance, some digital trickery may have been employed, but the CGI blood looks surprisingly believable, and Tanigaki emphasizes the realism of his stunts with frantic long takes at every opportunity; few are spectacular, but most enhance the clumsy acrobatics of the fights, which continue even when both fighters are on the ground. These hectic moments on the ground are typical of the director's dedication to elevating the combination of Chinese martial arts and MMA, a fusion most evident in the scene where Wang fights atop a human pyramid of a henchman he's beaten into submission.
This highlight is merely a fun touch in the middle of a spectacular scene that seems to climax multiple times, like so many other action scenes in The Fast and the Furious. The best of these is saved for last and works, despite the film struggling to make its sociopathic main villain (Joey Iwanaga) as interesting as his colorful crew of thugs. The least successful of these, set in a crowded apartment building just when the plot is starting to drag, is brought back to center stage by a single motorcycle stunt that reimagines the hallway fight from Oldboy as a drive-by shootout. This unevenness hangs over a film that destroys everything it holds dear and mindlessly slaps everything else together, but when the climaxes are this high, it would be foolish to focus on what lies in between. It's currently the best action movie of the year according to American audiences, and nothing else even comes close to it.
Rating: B+
The movie "Furious" is now showing in cinemas.
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