There are action films, and then there’s “The Furious,” which throws so many elaborate, eye-popping fight sequences at you, that you can’t help but watch with your jaw on the floor.
The story is pretty straightforward: Wang Wei (Xie Miao) is in a rage when his daughter is kidnapped by gangsters. The police refuse to help, so he takes matters into his own hands. He ultimately teams up with Navin (Joe Taslim), whose wife has disappeared, and the two punch, kick, flip and sideswipe their way through tons of bad guys to rescue their loved ones.
Just about every body part is a weapon: Shoulders, knees, legs, arms and hips are incorporated much more than fists. Additionally, bodies are maneuvered strategically as aids in the fight. People are leaped over, shimmied under and even climbed like ladders.
Some of the film’s most buoyant acrobatics are illustrated in this moment, when Wang Wei is fighting henchmen at a club and manages to somersault his way over the men and a railing, elbowing and kicking along the way. Watch it here:
I spoke to the movie’s director, Kenji Tanigaki (the action designer for the 2024 Hong Kong hit “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In”) and the action choreographer, Kensuke Sonomura, about how they pulled this off without special effects.
“We wanted to make the ultimate action movie,” Tanigaki said via a translator during a video interview. But he explained that his previous work has usually involved more popcorn movie-style action, with wire work and car chases. This time, he said, “we wanted to focus a little more on grounded actions,” moves that could be accomplished with people alone.
Sonomura specializes in this kind of choreography. “I came from a background of Japanese productions that were a little more tight on the budget,” he said, also speaking through a translator. “So if you wanted to shoot something with a lot of height, you’d have to build something. But if you didn’t have a budget, you’d have to make it with humans, like human heights.” He said he used that tactic here as well, even though this production had a much larger budget to work with.
Let’s look again at those human heights, and count Wang Wei’s somersaults in the process:
Sonomura first went to the club in Bangkok where this scene was shot to make some calculations about the floor space. “We measured how many people would be able to reach the bottom if the number of people gradually increased,” he said. Then he used those measurements to build the scene with his stunt crew in Tokyo a few months before shooting.
Tanigaki said that he went to the Tokyo rehearsal space one morning and saw the stunt crew practicing. “They’re rolling and rolling and rolling again. And in the afternoon, they’re rolling again, too.”
The production transferred to Bangkok and Xie joined at that time to perfect his part of the choreography. He has an extensive background in martial arts movies, having played Jet Li’s son in “The New Legend of Shaolin” (1994) and “My Father Is a Hero” (1995). He performs his stunts in this scene, which involve a good amount of the same rolling and rolling and rolling again the stunt crew perfected. Check out the shooting of his final roll over the railing:
And this all happens in the first act! It was a team effort, Tanigaki said, to keep the action moving, but also make it feel seamlessly integrated. “The henchman is struggling, but his arm is actually supporting the actor” on the way down, he said. “They’re fighting each other, but they’re working together.”
Produced by Rumsey Taylor.
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