‘The Furious’ Kicks Ass

What’s the sickest action sequence you’ve ever witnessed on screen?

I’ll give you five.

There’s the tea parlor shootout at the top of John Woo’s Hard Boiled, of course, as well as Jackie Chan’s multi-level shopping mall free-for-all at the close of Police Story.

William Friedkin constructed more than a few throughout his career, none better than the stalking-slashing set-piece at the climax of The Hunted.

I still don’t know how John Frankenheimer made Ronin’s Paris sedan chase without killing anyone.

Ditto the first tanker assault in Mad Max: Fury Road, that symphony of soaring bodies and spiky, speeding metal.

By my count, Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious adds at least three to the canon.

Filmed in Bangkok and set “somewhere in Southeast Asia,” The Furious brings together some of the greatest living martial arts actors from China, Thailand, and Indonesia for 113 minutes of nonstop bodily annihilation.

People fight in nightclubs, in open-air market halls, in ice freezers, in police stations, and off the side of a truck.

It quite literally kicks ass.

The set-up for all this fun is typically grim.

A mute plumber named Wang Wei (Chinese direct-to-video superstar Xie Mao) is about to send his young daughter Rainy (Yang Enyou) back to her grandparents in China, when the girl is tricked and kidnapped by a human trafficking ring.

When the police prove less than helpful, Wang goes in search of them himself, a rescue-and-revenge mission that brings him in (literal) contact with Navin (male model and judo champion Joe Taslim), an independent journalist searching for his wife, who disappeared while investigating the very same trafficking operation.