What to Watch After You've Watched The Furious (Or Before, That's Perfectly Fine Too)

The most-anticipated martial arts film in years has finally dropped in North America, almost a year after it premiered last year at the Toronto Film Festival. I haven’t seen The Furious yet. I tried to cover it during its festival run, but screeners weren’t forthcoming. No screeners for its theatrical release either: for the first time that I can recall, an action movie of this sort opted for in-person press screenings rather than digital screeners. This is likely what is responsible for its high profile and the hype surrounding its release: amazing the amount of press you get if you show critics a movie in a theatre.

Accompanying such hype, where all of a sudden mainstream critics who couldn’t be bothered to watch an East Asian action movie otherwise are suddenly gushing about a new release, always presents a dilemma for long-time genre fans. I’m just old enough to remember when liking popular things wasn’t cool, so I’m always conflicted when something from my little world breaks containment. There’s always the hope though that a breakthrough hit will widen the market for my kinds of films, that people like the choreographers and stars of The Furious will become mainstream and be given greater and greater opportunities to show and capitalize on their many talents. Or that the North American audiences and distributors will finally become less provincial and begin according the kinds of movies I like the respect they offer to middling European festival fare.

rrr

Of course, the last time an action movie received the amount of hype The Furious has gotten was SS Rajamouli’s RRR. Not in RRR ’s initial release, to be sure, that played in the segregated corners of AMC and Cinemark multiplexes devoted to Asian cinema–the South Asian, Chinese, Korean, Filipino mainstream films that take up a handful of screens every week and yet receive no mainstream critical attention. RRR ’s popularity came later, after a handful of enterprising critics, programmers, and theatres started playing it in one-offs and late night screenings, building it up over the course of a year into a bona fide Oscar nominee. Did RRR ’s breakthrough lead to a growing embrace of South Asian action cinema by mainstream audiences? Have scores of theatres followed suit by heavily promoting the thrills of movies like Ponniyin Selvan, Jigarthanda DoubleX, Jawan , or even, to jump genres, Rocky aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani , all of which come out in 2023, a year after RRR , and played American multiplexes? No, of course not. After RRR got its Oscar, mainstream American critics went right back to ignoring South Asian cinema like they always have.

rocky aur rani

Nor did RRR ’s success lead to a widespread reckoning with Rajamouli’s earlier work, even though, in my opinion at least, his preceding films, the two-part Baahubali and the karmic revenge saga Eega are significantly better movies, even without getting into the, let’s say complicated, politics of RRR itself, issues around which most American critics (myself not excepted) are almost totally ignorant. About the only tangible result I’ve seen of RRR ’s success over here was a rerelease of Baahubali after it had been recut into a single 225 minute version (100 minutes shorter than the running time of original two films together). But, I don’t know why anyone would bother with that, I certainly didn’t. Just watch the two movies, they’re great.

Anyway, all of this is to say that the people behind The Furious , the actors, director, choreographer, etc have put together a tremendous body of work over the last few decades. And it’s great that they’re finally seeing some success in the West. But I desperately hope this isn’t the last time their work sees American (theatrical) screens, or the only time the critical establishment bothers to check out their movies. To that end, I’d like to suggest some Subjects for Further Research for those who are discovering these artists for the first time. Everyone has to start somewhere: I remember with humility that I’d never heard of Jackie Chan or Wong Kar-wai until Quentin Tarantino told me about them.

spl: sha po lang

Director Tanigaki Kenji is one of the more accomplished fight choreographers of the 21st century. Along with his longtime collaborator and star Donnie Yen, he was instrumental in integrating MMA-style fighting into the Hong Kong action tradition, melding it with the opera acrobatics of choreographers like Sammo Hung and Yuen Woo-ping and the wushu athleticism of stars like Yen and Jet Li. Yen’s mid-2000s SPL: Sha Po Long and Flash Point are the keys films in this transition, and Tanigaki served as stunt coordinator for both. He filled the same role on a trio of Yen period films (Bodyguards and Assassins, Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chan Zhen , and Wu xia) before spending most of the last fifteen years hopping back and forth between Hong Kong (Yen’s very bad Big Brother and Benny Chan’s solid Raging Fire), China (Jiang Wen’s excellent Hidden Man, Gordon Chan’s decent God of War), and Japan (where he choreographed three Rurouni Kenshin films (featuring Satoh Takeru from Glass Heart). In recent years, he’s renewed his collaboration with Yen, directing him in the awful Enter the Fat Dragon, and choreographing him in the forgettable Sakra and The Prosecutor.

limbo

Tanigaki’s best work in recent years came in 2024 with the choreography for Soi Cheang’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In. Cheang is one of the great Hong Kong directors to come to prominence in the 21st century, working in a variety of genres to keep the spirit of Hong Kong’s cinema alive in the face of the all-consuming and controlling size of the Mainland market and censorship system. Cheang began making low budget horror and action movies around the turn of the century, stuff like New Blood, Death Curse , and Love Battlefield. In 2009 he hooked up with Johnnie To’s Milkyway Image company to make first Accident and then Motorway (2011), which helped establish him in the mainstream. From there he embarked on an ambitious, big budget series of Monkey King films, the first of which stars Donnie Yen and isn’t very good, though the next two get a lot better. Lately he’s back to his independent ways, with the grimy noir Limbo, the Milkyway Image film Mad Fate and Twilight of the Warriors.

spl 2: a time for conseqeunces

Cheang’s best film is arguably SPL 2: A Time for Consequences , an unrelated sequel to the Yen/Tanigaki movie choreographed by former Jackie Chan collaborator Nicky Li Chung-chi. SPL 2 starred Wu Jing, who was in the midst of a run of action films that would make him the biggest action star in China (Wolf Warriors_, Call of Heroes,_ The Wandering Earth_,_ The Battle at Lake Changjin), and Tony Jaa, the muay thai fighter turned underground action legend following the breakthrough of his super-low budget brawler Ong Bak in 2003. Jaa’s follow-up, The Protector , was one of those Asian action films to get a theatrical release in the 2000s, when distributors and bookers were more open than they are today, and is most notable for a very long single-take fight sequence, a novelty at the time that would quickly become a cliché in action cinema. Nearly stealing SPL2 in the final three-way fight sequence is Zhang Jin, who had began his career as a stuntman (doubling Zhang Ziyi and Michelle Yeoh in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and had from there moved to supporting (The Grandmaster, Ip Man 3) and then lead roles in films like Fruit Chan’s Invincible Dragon and Yuen Woo-ping’s Master Z: Ip Man Legacy. He had a small role in this year’s Blades of the Guardians, alongside Wu Jing and Nicholas Tse (Raging Fire, Customs Frontline), but his most recent lead role was in 2025’s iQIYI film The Old Way.

invincible dragon

iQIYI is the streaming video service that is the easiest way for American viewers to find the most exciting Chinese-language action cinema being made today. Working quickly and cheaply, directors like Chris Huo and Qin Pengfei have established themselves in a few short years as first-rate fight filmmakers, building around them a new generation of stars in a way that Hong Kong seems increasingly unable to accomplish, stars like Bao Baier (The Sixth Robber, Black Storm) Ashton Chen (Drunken Prodigy_,_ Blade of Fury) Henry Prince Mak (seemingly every movie with a Sniper in it), Yang Xing (The Bodyguard, King of Snipers), MIYA (Shell Girl, Mutant Ghost Wargirl), and Raquel (Wild Agent 2, Queen of Triads). Foremost among these stars is Xie Miao, who like Ashton Chen began his career as a child actor in 1990s Hong Kong martial arts movies, but whose career floundered (small roles in Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain and The Thousand Faces of Dunjia appear to be highlights) until iQIYI gave him a chance to show his skills. In 2021 he starred with Raquel in Queen of Triads 2 , which is probably her best movie, and starred in Fight Against Evil for Qin Pengfei (director) and Yang Bingjia (screenwriter). Qin and Yang’s Fight Against Evil series, along with their concurrent Eye for an Eye films (with Yang directing and Qin choreographing) are the most famous of the iQIYI films in the West, the ones that have come closest to breaking through to the mainstream, though I’d say Chris Huo’s King of Snipers, Second Life, and The Sixth Robber are better. There’s reportedly a third Eye for an Eye film in the works, which will combine Xie’s Blind Swordsman with Ashton Chen’s drunken bounty hunter from Blade of Fury. It should be one of the most anticipated films of its year, especially coming off Xie Miao’s starring role in The Furious. I guess we’ll see.

fight against evil

Starring with Xie Miao in The Furious are Joe Taslim and Yayan Ruhian, who starred in the 2011 Indonesia film The Raid: Redemption , probably the last East Asian action film to receive The Furious -level hype. Ruhian, Taslim and their The Raid co-star Iko Uwais have had some middling success around the world in the fifteen years since that film’s breakout: Uwais was in an Expendables movie, Keanu Reeves’s Man of Tai Chi, and Snake Eyes (in which Tanigaki Kenji also served as a fight coordinator and played “Yakuza with Eye Patch”); both Uwais and Ruhian appeared in The Force Awakens , though they weren’t allowed to do anything but run around in the dark, chased by pixels; Taslim appeared in Fast & Furious, Star Trek, and Mortal Kombat movies. Ruhian’s probably had the most fun subsequent filmography, appearing in a John Wick movie, a couple Liam O’Donnell Skylines movies, Miike Takashi’s Yakuza Apocalypse, and most recently Josh C. Waller’s excellent Lone Samurai. Uwais and Taslim both starred in Timo Tjahjanto’s brutal The Night Comes for Us in 2018, and Ruhian appeared in Tjahjanto’s The Shadow Strays, one of the best action films in recent years from anywhere in the world, but which disappeared into the ether of a straight-to-Netflix release.

the shadow strays

One would think that releasing a film on the one streaming service that every mainstream critic in America subscribes to would be a good way to raise an action film’s profile, but as we’ve seen with The Furious , it takes an in-person press screening for that to happen. That’s the only explanation (the only explanation) I can think of for the establishment’s continued ignorance of the work of The Furious ’s choreographer Sonomura Kensuke. The Baby__ Assassins films and TV series have been widely available in the US for years, the movies streaming on VOD and Amazon and the Hi-Yah!! Channel and available on BluRay thanks to distributor WellGo USA, and the series on HBO Max for the past year or so. Off-beat slacker comedies about the friendship between two young women who are forced to live together and get real jobs as a cover for their real job as killers for hire, the Baby Assassins franchise is one of the absolute peaks of world culture in the 2020s, and Sonomura’s fight choreography, executed brilliantly by star Izawa Saori, is one of the series’ great calling cards. I can’t recommend enough Jonah Jeng’s recent essay on Sonomura in The Notebook—he’s terrific at explaining the nuts-and-bolts of what makes Sonomura’s style so unique and exciting. Baby Assassins is written and directed by Sakamoto Yugo, who aside from these films has made the very clever slasher film Yellow Dragon’s Village and more recently the wonderful slacker musical Nemurubaka. Sonomura himself has directed a fine trio of action films: Bad City, Hydra and, most recently, Ghost Killer with Baby Assassins star Takaishi Akari (also of Glass Heart) from a script by Sakamoto.

baby assassins 2

The Furious ’s scriptwriters have an impressive pedigree as well. There are three credited on the hkmdb. Frank Hui was one of the directors of Milkyway Image's 2016 Trivisa omnibus project and worked with Sammo Hung on his last directorial feature My Beloved Bodyguard. Mak Tin-shu also worked on Trivisa , as a screenwriter, a role he also performed on several subsequent films, including Johnnie To’s Three and Chasing Dream, Wai Ka-fai’s Detective vs. Sleuths, and Louis Koo’s Warriors of Future; his directorial debut, Dog Day Evening , with Michael Ning and Fish Liew, is scheduled to open this week in Hong Kong. Shum Kwan-sin is a credited writer on Soi Cheang’s Limbo and Twilight of the Warriors , along with Jack Lai’s very fine zombie film Possession Street. The Furious ’s score is by Elliot Yeung, who appears to be propaganda titan Dante Lam’s go-to composer (Operation Red Sea_,_ The Rescue_, Battle at Lake Changjin_).

battle at lake changjin

Okay I’m going to stop there. I’m sure I could go on and on about the people involved with The Furious (hey Brian Le was in the Seattle-based martial arts movie The Paper Tigers!), it really does feel, without having seen it, like the culmination of the last couple of decades of East Asian action filmmaking, pulling from traditions established in Hong Kong and Japan, Indonesia and Thailand, China and America, to create one big bloody whole and dropping it right in among the people hyped for Toy Story 5 and Disclosure Day and Masters of the Universe , where lowlifes like us who prowl the dregs of the nation’s streaming services for the newest and weirdest in action filmmaking absolutely do not belong. These are disreputable films, and every once in awhile the normies take a peek at what we’re watching to find the kind of disreputable thrills they can’t usually find at press screenings. They’re excited and they should be. But they’ll leave us to our wanderings soon enough. But hopefully not before we capture a few converts who have ever so briefly been given a chance to see the light at their local multiplex.

remembering some guys (the paper tigers)