My notes on Huo zhe yan (The Furious)
At once exhilarating and exhausting, this is a breakout action film from Asia – Japanese director Kenji Tanigaki assembles fighters from many countries and though the film is shot in Thailand it’s set in an unnamed South East Asian country which isn’t China. In a prologue, an investigative reporter (JeeJa Yanin) breaks into a hellhole warehouse where abducted kids are being tortured – she puts up an amazing fight, but is stopped in her tracks by an archer and an apparent white-collar boss (Joey Iwanaga). Later, a Chinese mute (Miao Xie) has a minor squabble with his daughter Rainy (Yang Enyou), who doesn’t want to do her kung fu homework – and while he’s in a bit of a sulk, she’s lured away by a battered kid who’s doing the bidding of the abduction gang. After that, the determined Dad is on the case – joined by an undercover guy (Joe Taslim) who was the reporter’s husband and is now posing as a child buyer – and out to get the girl back, though his focus naturally widens when the kid herself insists that rescue isn’t enough and he needs to free all the captured kids (including the judas goat) and demolish the racket. That’s about it for plot – even father/daughter bonding here is demonstrated through fights.
What we get is a series of astonishing set-pieces – Dad chasing the garbage truck on which Rainy is held captive (he literally runs over broken glass) … a brawl in a MMA club run by cowboy-hatted mid-level baddie Song (Sahajak Boonthanakit) … a fight in an ice-house, where one minion who failed to stop the heroes has been frozen in a solid block (yes, this gets smashed) … a raid on ‘the Snake Pit’, where the kids are held, which gets into Raid territory, while some social comment is expressed as a corrupt police captain holds his forces back to allow a crowd of obviously murderous gangsters to pile into the place despite the complaints of the onlookers (yes, there are good cops who eventually rebel – including an ethical woman and a comedy fusspot) … a higher-ups meet of the bad guys which does not go the way anyone expected and ups Iwanaga to super-villain stature after the whole crime family finally decide they’re not too keen on child-trafficking … and a five-way battle in a police station during a thunderstorm which also prings in the enormous Ho (Brian Le), who is even more impervious to pain or injury than the rest of the gang.
This exaggerates the convention of martial arts movies that heroes and villains can keep on kicking after sustaining the most dire injuries, but Tanigaki also takes ‘mixed martial arts’ as a mission statement and is constantly playing on improvised styles or the use of found objects (a hammer, bicycles, desks) as weapons (very few guns, though – a necessary contrivance of the genre) while the characters express themselves through legwork (a lot of JCVD splits, though usually with violent impact rather than as a pose), melees in which bystanders or opponents are used as weapons (this often goes with cluster-fuck as a fighting style) and the addition of Ho, who wants revenge on everyone on either side of the law, tosses a wild card into the finale. It has big, simple emotions – but there’s also underclass/exploited anger … it might make an interesting double bill with Sound of Freedom, that MAGA talking point movie which plays differently with the current administration’s suppression of the Epstein files, or Simon Rumley’s smaller-scale Crushed, which takes a similar premise in a very different direction.
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