Director Kenji Tanigaki’s “Fast and Furious” has four screenwriters credited, but only one action choreographer. If you’ve ever wondered about the adage that two heads (actually four) are better than one, let us put it to the test. No one would fault the screenwriters for working overtime to come up with a last-minute plot and last-minute dialogue for this barn-burning martial arts movie, but choreographer Kensuke Sonomura said it was far more valuable. With brutal hand-to-hand combat, highly resourceful weaponry, and shocking carnage through horrifying body contortions, Fast and Furious is such a feat of collective physical coordination that the finer points of character and story can take a backseat. This is a movie that comes for the fight, stays for the fight, and is unlikely to make you feel shortchanged.
The third film from director Tanigaki, himself an accomplished action choreographer and stunt coordinator, this culturally fused Hong Kong production was picked up for international distribution by Lionsgate after a raucous fall festival run and came in second in the People’s Choice poll for Midnight Madness in Toronto. Sure enough, the film is a crowd-pleaser of the loudest kind, likely to cause applause midway through the film after one particularly intense action set-piece, not to mention laughs at the more absurd aspects of its composition. Much of the admittedly sparse dialogue is dubbed in awkward English, and Mandarin, Thai, and Tagalog also appear, but this flashy, violent, brash, and fun film is clearly aiming for crossover cult status when it opens worldwide tomorrow, and it could very well reach it.
If Xie Miao, a Chinese martial artist and former child actor, appears best in film ensembles that are less concerned with the more intellectual aspects of acting, that’s partly because he doesn’t suffer from multilingual, jarring dialogue. He plays an unnamed blue-collar worker stationed in an unnamed country where child traffickers are running amok and a corrupt police force doesn’t really care, but is very diplomatically advertised on screen as just “somewhere in Southeast Asia.” This is bad news for the unnamed protagonist’s nine-year-old daughter Rainie (Yan Enyu, cute as a button but with a fun spirit), who comes from her native China. She is quickly poached by a group of criminals, who, as already established in the creepy prologue, seem to be engaging in mass torture rather than child trafficking, and thrown into the back of a truck.
On the bright side, her father is a man with his own very special skills, some of which include maintaining incredible sprint speeds when chasing trucks. The same goes for sandals. This is the cue for the movie’s centerpiece first fight scene. It all unfolds in the open bed of a moving vehicle as Barney relentlessly shifts momentum and knocks him down. And even more impressive are our guy’s unfortunate shoes. The kind of quirky, witty details that heighten much of the conflict throughout “Fast and Furious.” He’s eventually forced out — or it would have been a short film — but finds support in fellow maverick Navin (Joe Taslim, the charismatic star of The Raid and recent Mortal Kombat series). Navin’s journalist wife goes missing while investigating this psychotic syndicate. At least in this case, teamwork will make dreams come true. They are a formidable, physically complementary pair.
When they finally track the kidnapper to their hideout in an industrial area, everything unfolds as expected. The wonders are all in the painstaking, back-bending, and sometimes literally eye-opening practical execution. Props are very important throughout the film, as ladders, hammers, and wooden pallets are all creatively placed, mostly to incite fistfights. When the bloody and exhausted combatants run out of ideas, they just start throwing bicycles at each other. Why not? The archery set is a more traditional instrument of death, but the diminutive villain played by Yayan Ruhian wields it with eerie poise. (You may remember him from “The Raid,” too; much of the casting here is a nod to the film’s own genre aspirations.)
But the human body remains the main weapon here, shattered, shattered, and somehow continually rebuilt through Sonomura-inspired combat routines. Rather than aiming for the gravity-defying, balletic grace of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (which he co-produced with Bill Kong), Fast and Furious’s action strives for a more visceral, flesh-on-flesh, sometimes clashing sound on concrete. That’s certainly not realistic. Fighters swarm in groups, filling the space in unlikely arrangements. But there’s an angular, tactile physicality to it all. Limbs stick out and stick out at awkward, obviously painful angles. One person’s back is another person’s support. The song may have been shot, cut, and scored in a predictably smooth manner. There’s a greasy, chemical glow to Meteor Chan’s lens, honing his guitar amidst the carnage. But “The Furious” doesn’t quite move like the other songs in the ring.
