Dir: Kenji Taniyaki. With: Miao Xie, Joe Taslim, Enyou Yang, Brian Le. 113 mins. Cert: 18
It keeps happening: every few years, usually during a run of especially lethargic American spectacles, the needle of screen violence gets recalibrated by a muscular wonder from the East. Thundering along in the bloody footsteps of the Raid films and the Hindi punch-‘em-up Kill, this martial-arts showcase from Japanese-born, Hong Kong-based director Kenji Taniyaki opens in generic dadsploitation territory: “somewhere in Southeast Asia”, as a caption has it, mute Chinese handyman Wang Wei (Miao Xie) tears off after the traffickers who’ve nabbed his daughter (Enyou Yang). Having Hulk-smashed its way out of the Taken box, though, The Furious starts to crank up. Boy, does it crank up: the closing half-hour achieves a pummelling intensity unlikely to be matched by any other 2026 release.
There are further developments: cribbing from John Woo’s buddy movies, Taniyaki has his hero run into an undercover journo (Danny Dyer lookalike Joe Taslim) with his own reasons for chasing the traffickers. Yet this route-one plot chiefly bears out the advantages of creatives following straight narrative lines while turning the dial to eleven. The complexities are reserved for the frame itself: here, jawdroppingly limber, seemingly boneless performers pull off bruising manoeuvres on concrete floors, Taniyaki’s well-placed cameras capturing unexpected delicacies and flourishes amid otherwise crunching dustups. It’s that deathless critical cliché for movie action – balletic – only someone’s brought a crossbow and a ballpeen hammer to the dance, and they’re intent on using them.
The Saturday night crowd won’t care, but Taniyaki doesn’t yet have the architectural sense that elevated the Raids, projects born of dojo and drawing board alike. And some may prefer their action more culturally specific: the film screens here in a base-covering polyglot version, part-subtitled, part-dubbed. The precision of its setpieces, though, is inarguable: wherever editor Chris Tonick cuts, he crafts soaring rhymes between bodies in motion. Climaxing with a royal rumble for the ages, Taniyaki’s film is never quite as bludgeoning as it might have been, tempering its ferocity with athletic and technical skill, matching that intensity with invention and delivering as much exhilaration as evisceration. One note of warning: you may require a long lie down afterwards.
The Furious opens in selected cinemas from today.
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