An international production in the vein of The Raid: Redemption and The Raid 2 Kenji Tanigaki's The Furious doesn't have much story or character depth, but what it does have is a tsunami of ever-escalating, jaw-dropping martial arts.
Somewhere in Southeast Asia, non-speaking Wang Wei (Xie Miao) makes a living as a handyman. His daughter, Rainy (Yang Enyou), is visiting from China, and he encourages her to practice martial arts. She is not interested, but does so to spend time with her father, whom she adores.
Meanwhile, Navin (Joe Taslim) has been searching for his journalist wife Matia (JeeJa Yanin), who disappeared after coming close to breaking a child trafficking ring. Using the information she gathered, he has been going undercover as a buyer. Unfortunately, Rainy is taken, and her father shows up at the same club where Navin is trying to trap the criminals. Much fighting ensues, but when Navin and Wang Wei realize they are fighting on the same side, they team up to rescue Rainy and take the whole organization down.
Directed by Tanigaki, The Furious mostly gets by on the charisma of its two leading men. Xie Miao is Chinese-born and has starred in films alongside Jet Li and Chow Yun-fat, while Joe Taslim was born in Indonesia and is probably best known for his roles in Fast & Furious 6 and the Mortal Kombat movies. Their characters' mutual respect and male friendship-under-fire recalls similar relationships in John Woo's The Killer (Chow Yun-fat and Danny Lee) and Hard-Boiled (Chow Yun-fat and Tony Leung Chiu-wai). Their unspoken communication in battle is almost instinctive (it helps that the Wang Wei character doesn't speak anyway).
The martial arts practiced here are impressive and awe-inspiring. As multiple practitioners battle, fighters use the bodies of other fighters both as weapons and as shields. Anything handy can be a weapon, from a metal cabinet to a bicycle. There are also a plethora of ways characters move to avoid being slammed by a sledgehammer or sliced with a huge blade. (We can practically see the combatants thinking.)
Action sequences are expertly filmed, with takes long enough for the eye to register what's going on, and with fighters costumed in such a way that we can tell them apart in a blur. (One character, played by martial artist and stuntman Brian Le, is a massive bear of a man with a bald head, and very easy to recognize in any speedy skirmish.) The villainous plot about child trafficking in The Furious is disturbingly relevant, but the father-daughter story is poignantly timeless.
