Kenji Tanigaki's The Furious opens globally tomorrow, moving from festival favorite to full release after a noisy run and an international distribution pickup by Lionsgate. The slimly plotted martial arts thriller has already done enough damage at Toronto’s Midnight Madness to finish second in the People’s Choice voting, the kind of showing that turns a crowd-pleaser into a title distributors want to push.
That timing is why the film is drawing attention now. It arrives with momentum, a built-in audience for action cinema and a clear pitch: a blue-collar worker, played by Xie Miao, races through an unnamed country billed onscreen as somewhere in Southeast Asia after his nine-year-old daughter Rainy, played by Yang Enyou, is snatched by criminals and tossed into the back of a truck. The protagonist gives chase in sandals, and the first major fight unfolds on the open bed of a moving vehicle, a sequence that tells you exactly what kind of movie this is before the plot has much chance to speak.
Tanigaki, an accomplished action choreographer and stunt coordinator making his third feature, leans hard on movement over exposition. Kensuke Sonomura is credited as the film's only action choreographer, but The Furious also carries four screenwriters, and the dialogue can be sparse, with clunkily dubbed English, Mandarin, Thai and Tagalog. That mix gives the production a scrappy, culture-blending texture that may explain part of the appeal: it is rough around the edges in the way some cult favorites are, and it is built to draw applause when the fighting starts.
That is where the movie’s odd balance comes in. The Furious has barely-there plot and dialogue that can sound ungainly, yet it is also being talked about as a crowdpleaser with crossover cult potential, the sort of action title that can survive on set pieces alone. Lionsgate’s pickup suggests the industry sees the same thing the Midnight Madness audience did: a film that may not need much story to leave a mark, and one that is finally reaching a wider audience tomorrow.
