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One of the most overhyped movies of the decade, The Furious, heavily pumped as the best action movies in years and riding a 98% RT rating as of this writing, is tediously monotonous and unintentionally cheesy.
Years ago, I went through a phase where I was really into martial arts action movies. Jackie Chan’s Rumble in the Bronx introduced me to a whole new world of choreographed over-the-top action and mayhem, which led me to Jet Li, Bruce Lee, and the like. There are a lot of great and fun movies from the genre.
Twenty-year-old me probably would have loved The Furious. Probably. Maybe.
An exercise in excess and quantity over quality, director Kenji Tanigaki subjects us to nearly two hours of nonstop fight sequences. It sounds cool, but The Raid this movie is not. The Furious attempts to make up for a lame story with an obsessive onslaught of martial arts fisticuffs, but oddly, while the action is technically proficient and well-choreographed, the style feels oddly dated or, at the very least, exhaustingly repetitive. Tanigaki occasionally achieves the intensity he is no doubt attempting to maintain throughout, but the more The Furious throws at the screen, the more tiring it all becomes.
A big issue is that each action sequence feels the same as the last. There’s no variety to the action: everything melds into the next, but not in a way that builds momentum or compounds to something greater. After a while you begin to disassociate with the action; sure, stuff is always happening, but can you really care?
Another issue is that the characters just aren’t very compelling. Our lead character, a mute, has near-zero charisma. We don’t know him, and it’s hard to really care for him beyond the baseline of “him good, others bad”). His eventual partner, the husband of a murdered reporter, doesn’t have much more substance to him; he’s just there to fight. The villains are fine but expendable, the lead guy cheesier than he is menacing.
The final Big Fight has impressive choreography, but by the end I and others watching with me were laughing—the scene goes on way too long and is a cluttered mess at times, with everyone punching and kicking each other in the same bland room for what feels like forever. Every time you’d think the fight was finally over, they all came back for more. All I could do was laugh, desperately hoping for it all to end.
The Furious has some solid scenes, but a little more plot and character development would have gone a long way. More varied action would have helped even more: for all its praise, The Furious lacks that big memorable “holy shit” sequence that great action films give us (other critics and fans would disagree with me there, but it is what it is).
Hype is a fickle thing, and the widespread accolades for The Furious is just absurd. Lots of action doesn’t mean good action, and The Furious only excels at one thing: tedium.
Review by Erik Samdahl. Erik is a marketing and technology executive by day, avid movie lover by night. He is a member of the Seattle Film Critics Society.