The Furious

The Furious hit theaters June 12, 2026: a Hong Kong martial-arts thriller from Lionsgate, made for around twenty million dollars, roughly what a Marvel movie spends on catering for reshoots. It premiered to a standing ovation at TIFF’s Midnight Madness and carries a near-perfect critics’ score. It earns every point. This is the most courageous action film in years, and it makes the modern Western blockbuster look like it gets ice cream at Weenie Hut Junior’s.

The setup is a back-alley fairy tale. Wang Wei is a mute handyman scraping by in an unnamed Southeast Asian city with his young daughter, Rainy. In broad daylight a child-trafficking ring abducts her. The local police chief is bought. The force is gutted. No help is coming, so Wang Wei goes to get her back himself. Along the way he picks up Navin (Joe Taslim of The Raid), a man whose journalist wife vanished pulling on the same rotten thread. Two grieving men circle one syndicate on a collision course that will have you cheering every punch, kick, dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge.

There is a lot of combat, and every hit feels like a hit. Damage feels like damage. Fights run in long, legible takes built around real people doing real stunts, with a sound mix that backs each connecting blow with cracks and crunches. It feels vicious because it is vicious, and that lands harder after years of Western action shot to feel fake, false, and CG’d to death. Recent Marvel, most big studio slugfests, even Netflix’s live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender: almost none of that action feels real. Mainstream Western action has spent fifteen years cutting around the small problem that most of its stars cannot actually fight, chopping a single punch into nine angles so your eye never lingers long enough to catch the phony.

The Furious also lets its protagonists be heroes. Wang Wei and Navin fight by something close to a Batman rulebook: they kick ass, leave bad guys unconscious in a stairwell, and move on. They hand out concussions the way villains hand out funerals. The bad guys always take the kill shot. Every time, every fight, they finish bloody and go further than they need to. That detail pays off by the end. You can read the whole moral map off the choreography with no dialogue: the good guys incapacitate for justice; they are not hunting body counts. Pretty cool.

Here is where the movie wins my whole heart. It has the nerve to hurt people. In the opening minutes, on screen and in full view, it looks you dead in the eye and puts an arrow through a child. That moment is a contract signed before the title card. Nobody in this story is safe. You will be guessing who walks out until the credits. Every fight afterward carries real dread, because the movie has already proven it will spend a life you did not want spent.

That is precisely the courage the modern Western blockbuster surrendered. It telegraphs every survival from a mile out and wraps every child in plot armor, flatly refusing to kill anyone it might want back for a sequel or a Disney+ limited series. The Furious spends them. It puts its most vulnerable cards on the table in the first reel and dares you to keep watching. Nerve is the rarest thing in this genre.

The film is in theaters on a full-price ticket. The script is thin and the seams show, but courage and craft bury those complaints alive. Gotta Finish It. See it on the biggest screen with the loudest crowd you can find. That TIFF ovation was no fluke. This thing plays like a contact sport, and an audience flinching in unison is part of the experience your couch cannot replicate. Full ticket. No hesitation.

Fair warning: if you came for story, temper it. You are getting a revenge skeleton and some clumsy lines. If you came for action shot with weight and real stakes, by people who respect your eyesight, this is the best of its kind since The Raid.