The action scenes in Kenji Tanigaki’s “The Furious” are like nothing else in the multiplex. Imagine combat choreographed by ants, swarms of elbows and legs scrabbling to emerge victorious. Churning piles of knees that hook and trip. A man swinging a ball-peen hammer at an incoming horde of baddies, knocking each unconscious as he scales their heaped bodies like a cheerleading pyramid.
Meet the next Asian film fighting style that will clobber Hollywood slap-happy just as Hong Kong wire-fu spawned “The Matrix” and Indonesia’s “The Raid” begot “John Wick.” In five years, Keanu Reaves will be brawling like this. (Although after decades of popularizing advancements in fisticuffs, he’s earned the right to relax.)
The brawls are the sole reason to watch “The Furious.” Story-wise, it’s rote: A father (Xie Miao) must rescue his kidnapped little girl (Yang Enyou). Smack the four credited screenwriters with a rubber mallet if you’ve heard that one before. The only narrative novelty is how audaciously cruel the movie is to kids. Tykes get slapped around, shot with arrows and dangled in traffic — tortures that are played seriously, but the shock of them allows you to guffaw.
To be fair, abducted 9-year-old Rainy is pretty cute, with solemn eyebrows and a conscience that continually puts her in peril. Thrust into a dungeon of other tots, she even punches a hobbled boy who deserves it.
Our setting is “somewhere in Southeast Asia,” according to the intro text. I suppose no country wants blame for a child trafficker (Joey Iwanaga) who commands his minions to snatch fresh minors as casually as ordering takeout. Or perhaps the vagueness stems from casting a mish-mash of Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Chinese and American actors. There’s no need to shake hands on a shared language when the ensemble talks with their fists. When forced to speak, a couple of the dubbed voices come off whiny.
To further slash the dialogue, the main protagonist is mute. I’ll accept that script choice. A nameless handyman with a mysterious past that receives, and requires, no explanation, Miao’s face is plenty expressive. So is his temper, which accelerates from zero to 60 in an instant. When Rainy is thrown in a pickup truck — literally lobbed into the back like a balled sweat sock — her dad immediately pursues in flip-flops that make a visceral thwack each time his vulnerable foot slams full-speed into the pavement.
The fretful electronic score is by Flying Lotus, Elliot Leung and Olivia Xiaolin. But really, what I’ll remember is the desperate sound of those sandals and later, the crack of a busted neck.
The cops of wherever this is are ineffectual. “You’re bleeding all over my counter,” one gripes when Miao races to a police station to report the crime. Instead, the dad allies with an undercover reporter (Joe Taslim of “The Raid” and the recent “Mortal Kombat”reboot) who is trying to find his wife (JeeJa Yanin), a fellow journalist also chasing the head of this crime syndicate. (There turn out to be a few.) A black belt in taekwondo, the impressive Yanin sets the bar high in the opening scene, battling two goons who hoist her aloft in the splits.
One of the attackers is the 5-foot-2 dynamo Yayan Ruhian who was so charismatic as the wicked Mad Dog in “The Raid” that he not only cameoed as a different character in the sequel, he even bludgeoned his way to a bit part in the “Star Wars” universe. Here, Ruhian diversifies his skill set, killing people at a distance with a bow and arrow, which feels like cheating. Eventually (and thankfully) he’ll put those weapons down.
The new name to learn is Kensuke Sonomura, a veteran stunt director making his biggest western splash to date. Sonomura’s style is volumetric; he dares himself to discover unexpected axes of movement. In his hands, that old chop-socky cliché where a circle of ninjas challenges the hero one at a time becomes a sphere of ninjas simultaneously engulfing the hero from above and below. A hallway fight doesn’t proceed linearly. Instead, attackers fill the space up to the ceiling, forming what I can only describe as a Dagwood knuckle sandwich. Nevertheless, Sonomura abides by gravity. His fighters don’t hover — they climb on each other’s backs.
Fans of Sonomura can identify his technique at a glance. Barely contained by screen, it resembles a microscope slide teeming with bacteria. Cinematographer Meteor Cheung doesn’t need to do much more than park his camera on a tripod and pan it side to side, occasionally looking down in alarm like a librarian peering over her glasses. But his color palette is so grimy that it becomes a hindrance. Does a dark basement have to be that dark? (For another angle on Sonomura’s genius, seek out the “Baby Assassins” trilogy, even more watchable for having good scripts.)
Here, perpetual motion tips over into physical comedy. The stand-out villain of “The Furious,” a bald bruiser played by Orange County-born Brian Le, moves like an 8-bit video game brute, wobbling his ankles before he falls down and goes boom. (You might remember Le as the pantless security guard in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,”) As massive as Le is, he jumps horizontally, hurling his muscles straight through the air. Another time, he mops the floor with an opponent — no, really — using the body to clear a pathway through the bloodshed.
Pairing Tanigaki with Sonomura is a treat. The director is a longtime action coordinator mentored by Donnie Yen; likewise, Sonomura has started to helm his own fastidiously staged chaos. This showcase of their combined talents — one epic, the other intricate — comes as both are transitioning to the boss in charge. That Lionsgate is giving what might be their one and only team-up a wide release testifies to the studio’s confidence that it will be one of the defining stunt films of the decade. They’re right to think so: “The Furious” will definitely leave a mark.
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