The Furious Review: The 2026 Martial Arts Spectacular That Earns Its Perfect Score

There are movies that arrive with the weight of expectation so heavy they buckle under it. Then there are the ones that carry it like armor — and step into the ring ready for war. The Furious, which opened in theaters on June 13, 2026, is very much the latter. With a Rotten Tomatoes score of 99% from 83 critics and a 96% audience rating to match, this is not the kind of critical consensus that happens by accident. It is the kind that happens when a team of filmmakers, choreographers, and performers deliver on a promise so audacious that it risks sounding hyperbolic until you see the film with your own eyes.

The Pedigree Behind the Punches

Director Kenji Tanigaki may not be a household name in every living room, but in the world of martial arts cinema, his credentials are formidable. A longtime fight choreographer for Donnie Yen, Tanigaki has spent decades behind the scenes, mapping the geometry of bodies in motion and turning hand-to-hand combat into something that reads on screen as close to poetry as it gets. The Furious is his moment in the director’s spotlight, and he does not squander it. He has built a film that is as much a love letter to martial arts cinema’s golden traditions as it is a blueprint for where the genre might go next.

The film brings together talent from across Asia, creating an ensemble that feels less like a casting call and more like a roll call of martial arts royalty. At the center is Xie Miao, the Chinese martial artist and former child star who has appeared in 28 films since 2020 alone, including The Monkey King and IP Man: The Awakening. Opposite him is Joe Taslim, the Indonesian actor and martial artist best known for his role in The Raid franchise and the Mortal Kombat films. And then there is Yayan Ruhian — the 5-foot-2 dynamo who played the unforgettable Mad Dog in The Raid and went on to cameo in both its sequel and a Star Wars film — appearing here to remind audiences why he earned that reputation in the first place.

This is not a cast that needs dubbing to be convincing. They need only to move.

The Fight Choreography: Where the Film Lives and Breathes

Let us be honest about what The Furious is: it is a movie whose plot could be summarized in a single paragraph and probably was, during one of its earliest pitch meetings. A lone operative goes after a criminal syndicate. A journalist’s wife goes missing, and her husband joins the pursuit. Along the way, they face increasingly absurd and increasingly spectacular challenges from a rogues’ gallery of villains whose personalities are expressed almost entirely through the way they throw a punch.

And it does not matter one bit.

The reason The Furious earns its near-perfect critical score is that it understands something fundamental about action cinema that too many modern blockbusters forget. The plot is the vehicle. The choreography is the destination.

Tanigaki and his action team have crafted sequences that range from the intimately brutal to the impossibly ambitious. Early in the film, a fight plays out entirely on the open bed of a moving vehicle — a relentless, momentum-shifting exchange in which Xie Miao’s character is thrown, bounces back, and keeps fighting, all while dealing with the inconvenient reality of his footwear, a small but witty detail that the Variety review picked up on and that elevates the entire sequence from competent to memorable.

Later, a police station brawl escalates into a five-way melee that should, by all logic, be a chaotic mess on screen. Instead, Tanigaki’s background in choreography shows through. Each character moves differently — a Judo throw here, a Muay Thai clinch there, a strike that feels lifted straight from an anime, as though the fighter has charged their attack like a video game character powering up a special move. The camera does not panic. The editing does not cheat. You can follow every limb, every impact, every reversal.

The AV Club called it “a balletic beatdown,” and that phrase is as accurate as any review headline I have seen this year. It is balletic not in the sense of grace — though there is grace in it — but in the sense of intentionality. Every step, every block, every counter is deliberate. You are watching people who know exactly what they are doing, captured by a director who knows exactly where to put the lens.

The LA Times Called It “the Future of Action Cinema.” Here Is Why They Might Be Right

There is a moment in The Furious — I will not spoil which one, because the joy of the film is in the sequence of discoveries — where the choreography stops feeling like something you have seen before and starts feeling like something you have been waiting for your entire life.

Action cinema has spent the last decade-plus in something of an identity crisis. The MCU leaned heavily on CG spectacle. The John Wick films perfected a sleek, neon-soaked aesthetic that inspired a thousand imitators but rarely an equal. The Mission: Impossible franchise kept raising the bar for practical stunts, but those stunts, for all their real-world impressiveness, often felt disconnected from the emotional core of the scenes they inhabited.

The Furious cuts through all of that by going back to basics — and then pushing those basics so far forward that they feel entirely new. The film’s fight scenes are grounded in real martial arts technique, drawing on Judo, Muay Thai, Silat, and traditional Chinese styles, but they are staged and shot with a visual vocabulary that is distinctly contemporary. Tanigaki’s eye is not the eye of a nostalgic. It is the eye of someone who has spent a lifetime studying this art form and who is now asking: what can it do that it has never done before?

The answer, it turns out, is quite a lot.

The Cast: Performances That Rise Above the Material

It is worth noting that the dialogue in The Furious has been described by critics as “dopey” and “multilingually tin-eared.” The Variety review did not mince words on this point, and they are not wrong. If you are coming to this film for its screenplay, you are coming to the wrong place.

But Xie Miao transcends the limitations of the script with a physicality that speaks louder than any line of dialogue ever could. He is the kind of performer who makes you forget about the words because the body is doing all the talking. His background as a child martial arts star gives him an ease on screen that cannot be faked — he moves like someone for whom fighting is not a performance but a native language.

Joe Taslim brings charisma to the role of Navin, the lone wolf whose journalist wife has vanished while investigating the syndicate at the center of the film. Taslim has the rare ability to make vulnerability and ferocity coexist in the same frame, and when he shares the screen with Xie Miao, their scenes crackle with a competitive energy that feels entirely earned.

Yayan Ruhian, as ever, is a force of nature. His presence alone is enough to guarantee that any scene he is in will be worth watching, and The Furious gives him room to do what he does best: move with a speed and precision that makes the impossible look casual.

The Verdict: A Genre-Defining Action Experience

There is a quote floating around in coverage of The Furious, attributed to someone involved with the film’s promotion: people will stop saying “best action film since The Raid” and start saying “best action film since The Furious.” It is a bold claim. It is also a claim that, after watching the film, I find myself inclined to believe.

The Furious is not perfect. Its plot is thin, its dialogue is functional at best, and there are moments where the sheer density of the action becomes almost overwhelming. But none of those things detract from what the film achieves at its core, which is the simple and profound act of making you feel the impact of every single punch, kick, and throw as though it were landing on you.

In an era of action cinema that is increasingly mediated by green screens and algorithmic editing, The Furious is a reminder of what the genre can be at its purest: bodies in motion, choreographed with intelligence and filmed with clarity, creating moments of genuine, unfiltered excitement. It is lizard-brain entertainment elevated to high art by the sheer force of craft.

If you are a fan of martial arts cinema, of action films, or of movies that remind you why you went to the theater in the first place, The Furious is not to be missed. The 99% Rotten Tomatoes score is not a fluke. It is a verdict. And it is a verdict that this film has earned with every bone-crushing, breath-taking, utterly spectacular frame.

Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5)

The Furious is now playing in theaters. Check your local listings for showtimes.