Beyond Fest at American Cinematheque 2025 Review: The Furious

Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious brings high-impact martial arts action to its U.S. Premiere at Beyond Fest 2025.

After a strong debut in TIFF’s Midnight Madness lineup, The Furious stormed into Los Angeles for its U.S. Premiere at Beyond Fest, bringing with it a global cast of martial arts talent and the distinctive fight design of director Kenji Tanigaki. Produced by Bill Kong (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), the film proves itself as an unapologetically high-octane entry in the international action canon, a work unbound by national borders and firmly rooted in the universality of survival, rage, and justice.

The story follows Wang Wei, a father and martial artist whose young daughter, Rainy, is abducted by a child-trafficking syndicate. His desperate search throws him against layers of corruption, including complicit local police, and brings him face-to-face with Navin, a journalist still haunted by the disappearance of his own wife. The pair join forces in a relentless quest that smashes through gangs, traffickers, and crooked institutions, uncovering key truths while clawing their way toward Rainy and the other children held captive.

What sets The Furious apart is not just the sheer spectacle of its combat sequences—designed with Tanigaki’s trademark precision and brutality—but also the breadth of its cast. Pulling from across Asia’s martial arts community, the film boasts fighters and performers whose physical storytelling makes every blow resonate. The action is bone-crunching yet never weightless, shot with a clarity that avoids the genre’s all-too-common pitfalls of shaky edits and overproduction.

Beyond the choreography, there’s a thematic urgency. By centering its story on trafficking and systemic exploitation, the film positions itself as more than just an action showcase. It weaponizes its genre thrills to amplify outrage at injustice, an approach that gives its relentless pace added moral weight.

If there is a fault, it comes in the film’s latter stretch, where pacing begins to sag beneath the sheer volume of set pieces. The narrative momentum occasionally stalls as characters cycle through similar confrontations. Still, the stakes remain personal, and Tanigaki manages to hold the core tension of fatherhood, loss, and shared resilience intact.

Verdict: The Furious is a blistering martial arts thriller that blends raw spectacle with contemporary resonance. Elevated by its international cast and anchored by Tanigaki’s kinetic vision, it confirms itself as one of the standout crowd-pleasers of Beyond Fest 2025.

Rating: 3.5/5