Film Review The Furious 火遮眼 (2026) - Hong Kong
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 9/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ 1/2
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There are films that tell a story, and there are films that become a force of nature. The Furious belongs to the second category. It does not ask for your attention. It seizes it by the throat and refuses to let go until the final, exhausted breath.
Wang Wei (Xie Miao) is a mute handyman living a quiet, dust-covered life with his young daughter Rainy. When she is taken by a trafficking network, the film wastes almost no time on exposition or speeches. It simply sets this silent, ordinary man in motion.
What follows is not a conventional revenge thriller so much as a controlled detonation of physical will. Joe Taslim’s journalist Navin joins him along the way, and the two men move through the underworld like twin storms—one wordless, the other driven by his own private loss.
Kenji Tanigaki, long known as one of the finest action designers working in Asian cinema, directs with the confidence of someone who understands that violence, when choreographed with intelligence and respect for the human body, can become a kind of pure cinema. The fights in The Furious are not merely spectacular; they are composed. Bodies twist through space with a logic that feels both brutal and balletic. Improvised weapons, architectural obstacles, and the sheer geometry of combat are used with the precision of a master craftsman. The celebrated police-station sequence is a particular high-water mark—dense, relentless, and almost unbearably sustained. By the final act the film has shed every unnecessary element and become pure forward momentum.
Yes, the plot is familiar. Yes, the dialogue is functional rather than elegant. None of that matters. The Furious understands something essential that too many modern action films forget: when the physical storytelling is this exact, this inventive, and this emotionally charged by the simple fact of a father’s silence, words become almost irrelevant. Xie Miao’s performance is remarkable precisely because he cannot speak. Every gesture, every impact, every moment of exhausted determination carries the weight that other actors would try to convey with speeches.
There is a moment late in the film when the camera holds on Wang Wei’s face after a particularly savage exchange. Blood, sweat, and something close to grief. In that stillness, the entire film crystallizes. This is not just about saving a child. It is about a man who has already lost the ability to speak to the world, and who now refuses to lose the one person who still hears him.
The Furious is not perfect. It does not need to be. It is ferocious, focused, and alive in a way that feels increasingly rare. For two hours it reminds you what the human body can do when pushed past every reasonable limit—and what a filmmaker can achieve when he trusts pure kinetic energy more than clever twists.
I walked out of the cinema with my pulse still elevated and a strange, almost grateful exhaustion. That is the mark of the real thing. (Neo, 2026)