The Furious (2026) Review By Kyle Fletcher
Have you ever been so pissed off that you wanted to drive your car through every car on the freeway? Ever want to punch something so hard your hand falls off? Break something into a million pieces till it turns to dust? The Furious (2026) decides to take that idea and just run with it for about 113 minutes until you have left the theater wanting to sprint so far until your legs have given up.
Many films in recent years have gotten “The Raid” comparison, yet none have come as close to this as being as viscerally angry and exhausting. The film kicks off pretty much after 10 minutes and then grabs you by the collar of your shirt and does not let go till you have been punched in the face 10 thousand times, and your face is no longer a face, but goop and flesh.
What really makes the film work is the chaotic and unrestrained energy of each fight. What first felt like a weakness, as each fight is so batshit crazy that it is almost hard to follow, becomes its greatest strength, as the fights feel less staged and more life or death. Every fight has a random, unrestrained quality to it; it feels almost like watching someone who filmed a fight in New York and posted it on Instagram reels.
However, within the randomness of these fights are talented choreographers and performers. Xie Miao and Joe Taslim, the two main stars, are actually trained in two different forms of martial arts from each other. Then, when looking more into it, the entire cast seems to be trained in different forms of martial arts, which may add to why some of the scenes lack that sort of staged look and feel like a bunch of guys all trying to get as many punches and kicks into the other guy that you yourself start to feel the pain.
The director Kenji Tanigaki, who has spent most of his career doing fight choreography, made sure to emphasize this random, visceral, and unrestrained nature through how the camera moves throughout these scenes. When watching movies like “The Raid” or “The Night Comes for Us”, or more recently, the “John Wick Franchise”, at times, the camera feels perfectly placed. So well staged and choreographed, just like the performers, that it feels balletic. And not to knock on those films, but the all out intensity of the camera in this film emphasizes these insane fight scenes so well because you never know what the camera is about to pan to, or when the camera is gonna pull back to let you breathe. The camera feels insatiable, as does the action; 5 punches are not enough, a sledgehammer to the face is not enough, these guys cannot quench their anger till the guy in front of them is lying dead on the ground two times over.
Now, to talk about the real reason this film is being praised, and it is a scene that is (deservedly so) being called one of the greatest action sequences ever put to film. Spoilers! The film ends in a fight scene that I have never seen before, or really even thought about before. Our two lead’s Xie Miao and Joe Taslim, go up against the two bad guys Yayan Ruhian (whom I could write 7 pages of love dedicated to) and Joey Iwanaga; but the kicker is that Brian Le, a bad guy who was supposedly dead earlier decides to come back to life and take vengeance on our two good guys for beating him up and the two bad guys because they killed his father, leading into cinema’s first (I think) 2v2v1.
What kicks off this 20 minute sequence is a 5 man split screen shot that is a close-up of everyone's faces, and when I tell you my friends and I yelped, we fucking yelped. A hoot and a holler like we were at the club. A shot so exciting it felt like when they announced the starting lineup for Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals. Electricity filled up that theater, and a levitation of my drunken body began. I fully jumped and sat completely forward for 20 minutes as my friends and I watched a 2v2v1, a fight so beautifully constructed you would've thought God themselves painted it. If that is not enough to get you all to go see this film, then maybe cinema is not for you.
