The Kid From “My Father Is a Hero” Is the Father Now: “The Furious” Hits VOD July 7

Thirty years ago, a small boy fought alongside Jet Li in My Father Is a Hero, playing a son whose devotion to his father powered one of the great Hong Kong action pictures of the nineties. That kid was Xie Miao. He is forty now, and in The Furious he plays a father tearing through a criminal syndicate to get his daughter back.

If that circularity does not give you a small chill, I am not sure action cinema is for you. The film arrives on demand and digital July 7 from Lionsgate, and it comes with the best pedigree any martial arts release has carried in years.

A Summit Meeting of Modern Action Cinema

Look at who is in this thing. Xie Miao carries it, backed by Joe Taslim of The Raid and Warrior. Yayan Ruhian, the immortal Mad Dog from The Raid, turns up. So does Jeeja Yanin, the Thai star of Chocolate. So does Joey Iwanaga of the Rurouni Kenshin films, and Brian Le, the Vietnamese-American fighter from Everything Everywhere All at Once and Shang-Chi.

That is Hong Kong, Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, and the American indie scene, all in one movie. Assembling that roster is the sort of thing that usually stays a message-board fantasy, and somebody actually did it.

Behind the camera is Kenji Tanigaki, one of the most respected action choreographers alive, a longtime Donnie Yen collaborator who designed the fights for the Rurouni Kenshin series and Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In. Producing is Bill Kong, whose credits include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero. XYZ Films, the outfit that brought The Raid to American audiences in the first place, handled world sales.

And in a detail I did not expect, Flying Lotus contributes to the score. Sure. Why not.

The Lead Never Speaks

Here is the bold swing at the center of the film, and it is the thing nobody mentions in the marketing. Wang Wei is mute.

Xie Miao plays the entire role without a word of dialogue, communicating through sign language, scribbled notes, body language, and the occasional furious slam of a desk. In what is effectively his English-language debut, he never speaks English, or anything else. Reviewers coming out of festival screenings have singled it out as the performance’s greatest strength, a quiet, contained man who becomes unstoppable purely through a father’s protective instinct.

Pairing him with Taslim’s more voluble journalist is smart construction. One man cannot say what he means, the other makes his living saying things, and both are looking for someone who has been taken from them. The film also does the correct genre thing and puts them against each other before it lets them team up.

The Fights Are Doing Something New

The consistent refrain from critics is that the action here is not simply well executed but structurally different. The fights function less like traditional exchanges and more like environmental puzzles, with Xie Miao solving rooms full of opponents by using their own torsos and limbs as leverage, terrain, and weapons. One reviewer compared the satisfaction to watching an expert Tetris player, which is a strange sentence about a martial arts film and also exactly right.

The showstopper, by broad agreement, is a mid-film sequence built around Brian Le wielding a sledgehammer, towering over both leads in a fight that has drawn the loudest praise. And for Raid devotees, the film delivers a rematch between Taslim and Ruhian, which is reason enough on its own.

TheWrap called it one of the best fight movies of this century. That is a large claim, and the reviews out of its Toronto Midnight Madness premiere suggest it is not an unreasonable one.

Where It Comes Up Short

Honesty demands the counterpoint, because not everyone came away converted. The plot is essentially Taken, and the film knows it, sacrificing story and characterization almost entirely to get to the next set piece. Some critics found the visuals dark and muddy, and at least one felt Taslim was underused, given generic brawling rather than the skill-based work he is capable of.

None of which will matter to the audience for this film, and I say that with affection. Nobody rents a movie called The Furious for the second-act character work. But if you need your action pictures to also function as drama, adjust expectations accordingly. The runtime is 113 minutes and the R rating for strong bloody violence is fully earned.

The Lineage Continues

We have spent a great deal of time here on Hong Kong action cinema’s back catalog, particularly the boutique restorations that keep it alive, and I have made the case before that something like Duel to the Death represents the form at its absolute peak, a film so inventive that describing it out loud makes you sound unhinged.

The Furious is that tradition still running. The specific pleasure of Hong Kong action was always craftsmanship in service of spectacle, real bodies doing genuinely difficult things in front of a camera positioned to let you see them do it. Tanigaki learned that discipline from the inside, spending decades choreographing before he ever directed, and this is what happens when you hand the keys to someone who came up through the stunt team.

The Details

The Furious lands July 7. Digital purchase runs $24.99 in either standard or high definition, with video on demand rental at $19.99. It is presented in 2.39:1 widescreen with a 5.1 audio option, English closed captions, and Spanish subtitles.

A word on that release pattern, since it is worth flagging. A film that premiered at Toronto to reviews calling it one of the best fight movies of the century is going straight to your living room in the United States. That is the current reality for martial arts cinema in this market, and it is a little galling, because these fights were built for a big room full of people gasping in unison.

Get the biggest screen you have. Turn it up. Somebody made this for you specifically.