With Eyes East

Directed by Kenji Tanigaki
Starring Xie Miao, Joe Taslim, Yayan Ruhian

These guys need to calm down!

We’ve got to talk about Joe Taslim and Kensuke Sonomura and Jeeja Yanin and all the With Eyes East favorites who’ve assembled for this action movie Super Bowl, but the story of The Furious might begin with a different name: Bill Kong. The last (and first) time producer Bill Kong came up on this site, it was in the comparison between live-action Blood: The Last Vampire – which he produced as a vehicle for Gianna Jun – and Kingdom: Ashin of the North, the homegrown Korean product which more successfully showed off Jun Ji-hyun to the world. If there’s one thing Bill Kong likes, it’s an American audience, as he also helped foster such crossover hits as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the Disney live-action Mulan. He may have found a fellow traveler in director Kenji Tanigaki, a Japanese action coordinator who cut his teeth in Hong Kong productions like SPL, Flash Point, and Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (not to mention odds and ends like Blade II and Takashi Yamazaki’s Always: Sunset on Third Street). Together, they’ve brought The Furious to the international market, starting with the Toronto International Film Festival, up to and including American screens the same day as the latest Spielberg release. That’s confidence.

Although comparisons to The Raid are a perfect starting point, the circumstances of its creation bring it closer to Twilight of the Warriors. This isn’t the exciting beginning of something, it’s a victory lap, with veterans of the craft in front of and behind the camera. A tribute to the genre, a greatest hits album, fan service with moments of eye-popping familiarity like, I assume, the recent Scary Movie. Want a rematch between Joe Taslim and Yayan Ruhian? You got it. Want to see Xie Miao from Eye for an Eye do that lightning Kensuke Sonomura fight choreography? Buckle up, pal. Want to just see Jeeja Yanin again? This is something of a double-edged kukri, however, because there’s an element of calculation behind the scenes. Sure, movies like The Raid and Versus are made with international audiences in mind, but more as a pipe dream. They’re as crazy as they are because the only producers on set are the ones who weigh injuries against shooting delays. No way is that industry veteran Bill Kong. The Furious doesn’t feel quite so dangerous. There are no moments of pure shock like in The Night Comes for Us where you scream, “What kinda psycho made this?!” Aside from one instance of eye gouging, I was cringing harder at the violence in The Forbidden City (the Italian movie!).

I’d heard that the story and the script – an English script, credited to four Chinese writers – was “atrocious,” by one critic’s estimate, but it’s an action movie, so who cares? Especially when we’re talking about action on this level, right? “A great deal” is how much it matters. The Raid has the advantage here for purity of concept, where the perspective in The Furious is split between our heroes and the kidnapped children – certainly not 50-50, but enough to where we see a little infighting among the kids, a little escape attempt, and so on. That’s the fat on the bone. This particular story of child trafficking, which feels very Hollywood by way of Luc Besson (another foreign producer with Western ambitions), also reduces our primary hero, Xie Miao’s mostly nameless protagonist. He has a single goal, and he pursues it in a singular way. More interesting is Joe Taslim’s character Navin, who goes in with a clever plan and does undercover work until our hero accidentally blows him up. Figuratively, I should specify, with this kind of movie. And yet more interesting is the villain, played by Joey Iwanaga, who went tit for tat with the babies in Baby Assassins 2. In a matter of seconds, he’s given motivation more immediate and compelling than hoary-old “give me back my family” could ever offer, leading into the kind of visceral bloodbath I’d been expecting for almost the entire runtime.

This is where it gets tricky, and where I’ve erred on the three-and-a-half stars out of four rather than something lower, because the fight choreography is truly jaw-dropping. It’s Kensuke Sonomura with a budget, where he’s now designing for sprawling, even vertical spaces, as well as dozens of combatants and even the odd prop thrown in. Not as many as I expected – though the sledgehammer is poetry in motion – and this is an honest-to-God sticking point. For a movie of this vintage, it’s not too gory or gruesome. In John Wick and that holy grail of Indonesian epics, a kill is like punctuation, or the beat in an ongoing rhythm. Without those “ooh” or “ew” moments, it does threaten to become sound and fury. Not helping is that the players in The Furious are immortal. Our hero’s initial pursuit of his taken daughter is only stopped when he’s pancaked by a car doing 50 in a residential zone (not cool!), and this elicits a groan or two before he’s upright again. It’s a trade-off, for sure; maybe not the hallways of blood like A Better Tomorrow II, but we do get “too angry or stupid to die” with Brian Le’s MVP character, who Navin describes as the “poster boy for brain trauma.” He’s like if Tor Johnson in Plan 9 from Outer Space could do kung fu.

The problem is that I’m spoiled, and not just by action movies, but the goddamn algorithm. I follow enough stunt people and like enough of the right reels that I’m constantly inundated by amazing choreography, usually in a gym or a warehouse, with no narrative. I need a movie to be more than that, whether by dint of story or the fantastical spectacle of gore. It’s an internal comparison here, as there’s a slow ramp-up to a bloody climax, which is 2v2 and then 2v2+1. A dizzying mayhem, self-aware enough for moments of levity between all the donkey kicks and human scaffolding. The speed here is matched by complexity, with configurations of human bodies reaching feverish Rube Goldberg devices in motion. These guys are throwing out more punches and kicks in a single scene than the denizens of Eternia witnessed in the entirety of Mortal Kombat II. And how lucky we are, to have back-to-back Joe Taslim movies? His light bromance with Xie Miao’s character is earnest and brisk, just enough to show off either actors’ charm.

Literally the cover art for DOOM

This may be the most negative positive review of all time, but I can’t say that The Furious is one of the greatest. Of course, the fact it’s even a legitimate contender is reason enough to drop everything and see it, and see it with a crowd. I had only a handful for the Thursday screening, but there were audible oohs and laughs in all the right places. I mean, there’s a moment when Xie Miao’s head gets smashed with such reverberating power that I got a headache. Is it the next coming of action movie Jesus? I think The Furious is extremely impressive, and it pushes the envelope in the choreography department while leaving most other departments as is. Kensuke Sonomora himself is kind of a trade-off, because he’ll give you the craziest hand-to-hand fighting you’ve ever seen – and nothing else. The set pieces are all hands, and they’re amazing, but when a story develops, the action should, too. There aren’t action scenes pitched more toward suspense or strategy, just bodies slamming into each other over and over again. It’s almost numbing, but when you come close to fuzzing out, you laugh instead at the sheer, absurd scale of the spectacle. The Furious is sure to be the most thrilling action movie to grace the silver screen in America until its promised sequel, but as international action fans know, competition is stiffer everywhere else.