How The Furious somersaults through a wild action scene

NEW YORK – There are action films, and then there is The Furious, which throws so many elaborate, eye-popping fight sequences at you, that you cannot help but watch with your jaw on the floor.

The story is pretty straightforward: Wang Wei (Xie Miao) is in a rage when his daughter is kidnapped by gangsters. The police refuse to help, so he takes matters into his own hands. He ultimately teams up with Navin (Joe Taslim), whose wife has disappeared, and the two punch, kick, flip and sideswipe their way through tons of bad guys to rescue their loved ones.

Just about every body part is a weapon: Shoulders, knees, legs, arms and hips are incorporated much more than fists. Additionally, bodies are manoeuvred strategically as aids in the fight. People are leaped over, shimmied under and even climbed like ladders.

Some of the film’s most buoyant acrobatics are illustrated in a scene in which Wang Wei is fighting henchmen at a club and somersaults his way over the men and a railing, elbowing and kicking along the way. The Furious is showing in Singapore cinemas.

The movie’s director, Kenji Tanigaki (the action designer for the 2024 Hong Kong hit Twilight Of The Warriors: Walled In) and the action choreographer, Kensuke Sonomura, explained how they pulled this off without special effects.

“We wanted to make the ultimate action movie,” Tanigaki said via an interpreter during a video interview. He added that his previous work usually involved more popcorn-movie action, with wire work and car chases. This time, he said, “We wanted to focus a little more on grounded actions,” moves that could be accomplished with people alone.

Sonomura specialises in this kind of choreography. “I came from a background of Japanese productions that were a little more tight on the budget,” he said, also speaking through an interpreter. “So if you wanted to shoot something with a lot of height, you’d have to build something. But if you didn’t have a budget, you’d have to make it with humans, like human heights.”

He said he used that tactic here as well, even though this production had a much larger budget to work with.

To determine the human heights, Sonomura first went to the club in Bangkok where the somersault scene was shot to make some calculations about the floor space. “We measured how many people would be able to reach the bottom if the number of people gradually increased,” he said. Then he used those measurements to build the scene with his stunt crew in Tokyo a few months before shooting.

Tanigaki said that he went to the Tokyo rehearsal space one morning and saw the stunt crew practising. “They’re rolling and rolling and rolling again,” he said. “And in the afternoon, they’re rolling again, too.”

The production transferred to Bangkok and Xie joined at that time to perfect his part of the choreography.

He has an extensive background in martial arts movies, having played Jet Li’s son in The New Legend Of Shaolin (1994) and My Father Is A Hero (1995). He performs his stunts in the somersault scene, which involve a good amount of the same rolling and rolling and rolling again that the stunt crew perfected.

And this all happens in the first act! It was a team effort, Tanigaki said, to keep the action moving, but also to make it feel seamlessly integrated. “The henchman is struggling, but his arm is actually supporting the actor” on the way down, he said. “They’re fighting each other, but they’re working together.” NYTIMES

The Furious is showing in Singapore cinemas.