The Furious Review: Martials arts action at its finest

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Kenji Tanigaki’s martial arts thriller overcomes paper-thin plot with blistering fight sequences

Though it swings into cinemas at the end of July, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is not going to see the webslinger’s action choreography come close to Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious, the king of the hill for 2026’s best action film.

The film’s setup is simple. Following the disappearance of journalist Matia (Jeeja Yanin) while investigating a child trafficking syndicate, her journalist husband Navin (Joe Taslim) picks up where she left off in order to find her.

Not long after, Wang Wei’s (Xie Miao) daughter gets kidnapped by the same syndicate. The mute plumber then drops his tools and whips out his fists of fury to save her.

Both individuals then cross paths, taking on the entire syndicate as they search for their respective loved ones.

Action that never lets up

The barely-thought-out plot is hilariously held together by duct tape but it does what it needs to do: Get the action going from one sequence to the next, which it does furiously.

Though Gareth Evans has left The Raid films and seems to have amnesia that his films revitalised and reinvented the modern martial arts and action film genre, The Furious proves the torch is still being carried forward.

Clunky worldbuilding aside, once the film gets going, it does not stop.

The hand-to-hand fight choreography and brutal fight sequences are some of the best in the industry, with Tanigaki progressively ramping up the technical scope and choreography with each sequence, from the barebones first fight between Matia and the syndicate right up until the big final sequence.

For those that watched the Rama and Andi versus Mad Dog fight in The Raid and Rama versus The Assassin in The Raid 2, The Furious’s fight sequence comes very close to toppling both by pitting not one, two or three combatants against each other, but two versus two versus one in an elaborate, technical free-for-all fight sequence.

Poor dubbing undercuts experience

Where the film falters – and this is subjective – is the choice to have voice dubbing any time anyone opens their mouth.

The film starts with a preamble of how it is set “somewhere in Southeast Asia”. But having a multicultural cast has everyone unfortunately speaking in a jarring, disgusting salad bowl of poorly dubbed English, Mandarin and Tagalog.

Those who enjoy watching foreign films where non-English-speaking characters speak their native language and have the mental capacity to also read the subtitles while watching the rest of the screen, will not enjoy how badly overdubbing ruins The Furious.

The film is a multicultural production – a Hong Kong film directed by a Japanese man and starring several Indonesians, a Japanese man, Thai actors and a Vietnamese man, among others. Yet it appears to be ashamed to embrace their native languages whenever these characters speak.

Packed with so many impressive fight sequences that leverage on the different styles of martial arts and even scrappy street fighting, to be held back by the sluggish dub is a disservice to the raw, kinetic energy of The Furious.

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