The Furious (June 1)

I saw this cold as a mystery movie with Bestie earlier this week and probably would never have approached it any other way, because subtitles and I’m lazy, but there are a lot of things going for this maximalist martial arts orgy. The movie opens with a hilariously nondescript location tag like “Somewhere in Southeast Asia” which never gets anymore specific as time goes on, but it doesn’t matter, because you’re immediately dunked into a thrillingly acrobatic fight scene with the most badass woman you’ve ever seen–before never seeing another adult female again. You’re then yanked into a weirdly disconnected story about a “Chinese mute” whose identity is mysterious but ultimately doesn’t add anything to the plot when it’s revealed à la Renaldo Moon of The Cat Returns. The mute (played by Mo Tse) minds his own business while towing his loving young daughter around for odd jobs Somewhere in Southeast Asia, all while watching a news program about missing kids targeted in the Wrong Side of Town. Then, when he and his daughter go to the Wrong Side of Town, she goes missing because she is Taken, which is when Bestie leaned over to me and asked if this was the premise of Taken, just as the father launches into a full speed run in rubber slippers and launches himself through a window to track down the kidnappers trying to make an easy getaway. Spoilers ahead.

Really, it’s double Taken without any apologies. See, the badass lady you saw at the beginning has a badass husband (played by Joe Taslim of Mortal Kombat and Fast and Furious 6 fame!) who is also searching for his Taken girlfriend at the exact same time as the father! They coincidentally track down the Big Bad, who wears a fancy cowboy hat and speaks English almost exclusively (as do almost all the bad guys in the movie), at the same time, and arrive at his compound/club to wreak havoc at almost the exact same moment, which leads one to blow the other’s cover and then a fight between the two of them ensues like this is Captain America: Winter Soldier! A lot of the combat in this movie is pretty silly: Bestie brought up the fact that a lot of the choreography involves what can only be described as a kind of barrel roll on the ground or what she calls a “Roomba” move, where two guys kind of writhe on top of each other on the floor and then hop onto their feet.

There’s this other stance that comes up a lot where the heroes hold their outstretched hand really far out like they’re going to strike the other person in the face with a finger and instead of grabbing hold, all the bad guys avoid it like the plague. Anyway, the fight scenes sort of increase in complexity and culminate in the first act with a double head-to-head in Cowboy Hat’s fake mixed industrial site with some giant blocks of carbonite which he uses to freeze his enemies like Jabba the Hut–and then again in the second act with a five person three-way fight in which one of the Bads from the first act is resurrected to fight basically everyone with berserker energy.

The Furious is light on plot which is probably for the better, because the upside down ethics and logic of this Chinese influenced seems designed to get past censors for maximal box office gross: the police are mostly the good guys and evil speaks with an American accent. The movie’s score is the most generic 80s electric guitar riffs mashed together with soft piano music whenever the world’s most helpless karate kid is on the screen. “If you took the fighting out of this movie,” Bestie mused, “the runtime would be like ten minutes.”