Japanese action choreographer Kenji Tanigaki has spent three decades designing fights for other directors. With The Furious, which opened Friday via Lionsgate Films, he finally got the chance to orchestrate the one he always wanted to make — and critics are responding like they witnessed something rare.
The film entered wide release carrying a near-perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the highest-rated action movie of the year. Inevitable comparisons have arrived to acclaimed fight films like The Raid and The Night Comes For Us, though there are moments when The Furious feels like it’s inventing its own language entirely.
The film stars Xie Miao, Joe Taslim, Yang Enyou, Jeeja Yanin, Brian Le, Joey Iwanaga, and Yayan Ruhian. Xie Miao plays Wang Wei, a mute man who turns out to be extraordinary at kung fu when his daughter is kidnapped by a child trafficking ring. His unlikely ally is Navin, played by Taslim, a journalist whose own wife has vanished.
Much of what makes the film stand out technically is rooted in process. Tanigaki, drawing on three decades of action choreography, says the electricity in his fight scenes comes from pitting performers with different martial arts styles against each other. To keep the camera department in sync, he brought the cinematographer into rehearsals a full month before shooting began — an unusual step meant to give the DP time to learn the choreography alongside the actors rather than being handed complex sequences at the last minute.
Tanigaki described the dynamic between performers as collaborative under pressure: “They are fighting each other, but actually they must work together. So sometimes they pretend to be struggling but sometimes they support the actor lowering down.”
The film’s climactic police station brawl became its own production ordeal. Tanigaki spent 18 nights shooting the sequence in humid, hot conditions in Bangkok, with an exhausted cast and crew pushing through what he called very complicated choreography. The scope of that finale grew from a last-minute creative decision — Tanigaki chose to revive villain Brian Le’s character midway through, transforming what was originally a two-on-two fight into a chaotic five-person melee across three opposing factions.
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The film draws on a wide range of disciplines — kung fu, wushu, karate, taekwondo, judo, Muay Thai, and silat — and pays homage to Hong Kong classics throughout, including an ice factory brawl that nods simultaneously to The Big Boss and Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.
The project was produced by veteran Bill Kong, whose credits include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero, and premiered at TIFF’s Midnight Madness section in September 2025 before its international theatrical launch. Tanigaki has said a sequel depends on the first film’s commercial performance.
