Kenji Tanigaki drops Joe Taslim and Xie Miao inside The Furious, a pan-Asian revenge

The father is told his daughter has been taken, and the police he goes to first are the people he cannot afford to trust. The Furious opens on a kidnapping he cannot solve through the institution closest to it, and the film’s argument is what happens when that closure is removed. The man whose daughter is gone is the kind of protagonist action cinema invented and has not stopped revisiting. The film is what gets done with the visit.

What Kenji Tanigaki has built around that man is the part that matters. The cast is pan-Asian on a scale that few action films assemble in one frame. Xie Miao, the Hong Kong child prodigy who fought alongside Jet Li before he could vote. Joe Taslim, the Indonesian who turned The Raid into a passport. Yayan Ruhian, who taught the silat that put The Raid on the map. JeeJa Yanin, the Thai whose Chocolate work made her a fixture in Asian action. Yang Enyou, the young Chinese actress critics noticed in dramatic work and who now has to carry the kidnapped half of the premise. The Furious is the film that puts all of them inside the same frame and asks whether a Japanese action choreographer can run the whole table.

You May Also LikeClifford the Big Red Dog (2021). Movie Reviews

Xie Miao plays Wang Wei, the father. The casting is a return more than an introduction. He was the boy in The New Legend of Shaolin and My Father Is a Hero, a child performer who fought to a standard most adult action stars never reach. His later career has been quieter than that beginning suggested it would be, partly because the kind of work the early roles called for stopped getting made at scale in the Mainland industry. Putting him at the centre of a Wang Wei built for fury, not flourish, is a casting decision that asks the audience to bring whatever memory of the kid in white pyjamas they still carry. Yang Enyou plays Rainy, the daughter, a young actress whose face critics learned to read in Zhang Yimou’s One Second. She is not a fight performer, and that is the point. The film needs a child whose silence does work, not a small action figure.

Kenji Tanigaki is the structural argument. He is the choreographer behind the most-praised Donnie Yen fights of the last cycle, the SPL sequences, the Flash Point hand-to-hand, the Wu Xia barn fight, the Ip Man finales that put the franchise’s signature on a series of opponents. He set the action of the Rurouni Kenshin films and has more recently shifted into directing whole features. The Furious is the film in which his choreographer’s grammar, close-quarters, hand-to-knife-to-elbow, hits that cost the body that throws them, gets the room to be the storyteller rather than the second-unit work that arrives after the script is delivered. The bet is that the choreography reads as an event, and the script reads as the place the choreography lives.

Joe Taslim plays Navin, the unlikely ally, a journalist whose wife has disappeared and whose search collides with Wang Wei’s. Taslim has not, since The Raid and Star Trek Beyond and Mortal Kombat, taken on a role that asks for the action lead and the procedural reader at once. Navin is that role. Yayan Ruhian plays Tak. Anyone who has watched The Raid knows what Ruhian on screen as an antagonist looks like and knows the body work he is capable of. JeeJa Yanin plays Matia. Her Chocolate is one of the cleanest action films Thailand has produced this century, and her presence in the cast is the third lever in a regional triangulation that is rare in studio-scale action. The film is, in one reading, the production decision itself: regional martial-arts performers who built a viewer base each across a different country, brought into one frame, with a Japanese choreographer-director.

What The Furious does not resolve, on the basis of what has been released, is whether the script earns the cast. The kidnap-and-corrupt-police premise is one of the most worked grooves in action cinema. Taken did it. Man on Fire did it. The Raid: Redemption did the same architecture inside an apartment block. Trailer images and a one-paragraph synopsis cannot tell anyone whether Tanigaki and his writers have found a frame the lineage has not already used, or whether the regional roster is being asked to do work the structure should be doing. The marketing has been heavy on bodies in motion and light on what the film is doing with the premise around them. The vote count is still effectively zero. That is a fact about the production schedule, not the quality, but it does mean nobody outside the production has seen the film at length yet.

The five credited principals are Xie Miao, Joe Taslim, Yang Enyou, Yayan Ruhian, and JeeJa Yanin. The runtime is one hundred and thirteen minutes. The genre tag, Action–Crime–Thriller, is the cleanest description available, and the Hong Kong original title 火遮眼 carries a meaning closer to fire-in-the-eyes than to fury, a register the English-language title smooths into something more legible to a Western marketing economy.

The Furious opens in the United States, Hong Kong, and Sweden on June 12, 2026, with theatrical dates already on the calendar in Indonesia on June 5, Singapore on June 11, Germany on June 18, the United Kingdom on June 26, and Thailand on July 2. A Korean theatrical run preceded the wider rollout in the previous calendar cycle, and a Saudi release went out ahead of the rest. The film is therefore the rare regional action production that arrives in front of Western audiences with a partial track record from Asian and Middle Eastern markets already on the board.

More Like This

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022). Movie Reviews

War Machine Review: Alan Ritchson Leads a Brutal Evolution of Tactical Cinema

Collision (2022). Thriller Movie on Netflix

‘Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre’ Movie Review: Guy Ritchie and Jason Statham, Superb Entertainment

Night Teeth (2021). Netflix Horror Movie

Fall – Movie Review: What a Rush!