The martial arts movie THE FURIOUS is coming to American theaters this week, and one of the most no-shit-Sherlock predictions you could make right now is that it will be the action movie of the year. It’s an undeniable banger. Everyone who sees it mentions THE RAID, an easy comparison to make not only because Joe Taslim is one of the two leads and Yayan “Mad Dog” Ruhian is one of the villains, but because it just has that same rare sense of relentless energy and unbridled, violent invention. The story has some of THE RAID’s elegant simplicity, but it’s not as contained, there’s much more variance in location and styles of action. It’s a huge feast of high level martial arts, and luckily I came in hungry.

It was one of my most anticipated films even before it started playing film festivals and igniting explosions of superlatives. That’s because it’s an international supergroup, an ensemble of greats from several countries doing top level work for Japan’s two best fight choreographers, who have a good claim to being the current world’s best. The director is Kenji Tanigaki, long time Donnie Yen collaborator and action director for the incredible RUROUNI KENSHIN series. Not too long ago he was the stunt coordinator for TWILIGHT OF THE WARRIORS: WALLED IN – if you saw that you know that’s a credit to brag about. Then the action director is Kensuke Sonomura, director of HYDRA, BAD CITY and GHOST KILLER and action director of my beloved BABY ASSASSINS movies and tv show. Each of these have a very distinct style – Tanigaki’s involves wires and cartoonish exaggeration, while Sonomura’s is more grounded and technical, quick slashing moves and handwork, but with spinning and sliding while firing guns in close quarters – and I love seeing them find a hybrid utilizing all of their powers.

It’s set in unspecified Southeast Asia (filmed in Thailand with a local crew but mostly Japanese stunt team), where an investigative reporter named Matia has infiltrated a child trafficking ring. But she’s not just a regular reporter, she’s one played by the legendary Jeeja Yanin (CHOCOLATE, RAGING PHOENIX, THE PROTECTOR 2, TRIPLE THREAT), so she tries to rescue the kids, and gets in a big, acrobatic fight with a bunch of thugs. (Warning: she’s billed as a “special appearance,” so…)

When Matia doesn’t come home, her husband Navin (Joe Taslim, THE NIGHT COMES FOR US, THE SWORDSMAN) searches the information she left behind to find her. Meanwhile, a mute Chinese man with a mysterious past named Wang Wei (Xie Miao, THE THOUSAND FACES OF DUNJIA, EYE FOR AN EYE) is visiting his daughter Rainy (Yang Enyou, who co-starred with Xie in EYE FOR AN EYE 2, where he’s blind instead of mute) when a kid lures her down the street so a dude can put a bag over her and yank her onto a truck.

This is a contemporary, urban world, there’s no magic, but there’s that heroic bloodshed exaggeration, that idea that if you’re tough enough and push hard enough you can hang on, at least for a while, no matter the amount of damage your body takes. And a particularly effective example of that is Wang Wei running barefoot down a city street, keeping up with that truck, trying to climb on. I winced at the sound of his flesh and bone pounding the pavement, horrified by the thought of catching a toe or skidding out and scraping through his skin. When they get away he goes straight to the police station for help and instead gets yelled at for tracking blood all over the floor.

If you can’t place where you’ve seen the bald kidnapper called Ho, it might’ve been EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE. Brian Le had lots of fights in that as the security guard, and choreographed it with his team Martial Club (the guys from the swimming pool fight in THE PAPER TIGERS). His character here is a sort of Frankenstein’s monster or Lennie Small type, so he mostly grunts, but he’s one of our American representatives in the cast, and he does us proud. You’ll see. When he runs on all fours and headbutts people like a bull it’s hard to imagine another actor for the role. Le described his character to Jordan Crucchiola at The Action Desk as “a baby’s brain in a big ass body.” It’s sort of a henchman role, but it’s one for the books.

Wang Wei and Navin follow separate clues that lead them to the same place at the same time: a cage fighting club where they battle through literal piles of professional fighters to get to the back room and see the surveillance recordings. They even fight each other before they figure out they have the same goal. And then they’re a duo.

Like all great art, this has many scenes where our players bash each other with hammers. Wang Wei carries a small one inside his jacket, while Ho later uses a giant sledge hammer. They fight with bottles, pipes, machetes, a ladder, there’s even a fight where two guys are just swinging entire bicycles at each other. Ruhian’s latest iconic character shows up on stormy nights like a supernatural slasher and shoots arrows that seem like they could take your entire head off.

It’s an effortless good guys vs. absolute scum of the earth set up, but for me I think the main reason this is so captivating and even beautiful to look at is that Tanigaki, Sonomura and the actors came up with such an array of novel fighting styles, and find many different combinations to pit against each other. Every character has a unique way of moving – such cool angles, shapes and rhythms, often coming out of their personalities or their specific goals in the scene. I’ve watched more martial arts movies than the average person, but there are times in this movie when I wonder, for example, have I ever seen anybody kick quite that? It’s an obvious observation that movie martial arts have some parallels with dance; moreso when the choreography is this transcendent. And the camerawork (cinematographer: Meteor Cheung) is excellent – lots of dynamic movement, but always to emphasize, never to obscure.

There’s a point where Wang Wei picks up his daughter in the middle of a fight, and though nothing as crazy happens it reminded me that holy shit, he was the wushu prodigy who played Jet Li’s son in MY FATHER IS A HERO. Now he’s the heroic father, and I love that. I’ve enjoyed him in the EYE FOR AN EYE movies, but he’s even better here, conveying such a strong character without speaking (which is thankful, since I’ve heard Lionsgate is only releasing it dubbed?).

I wouldn’t know this, but I read that Taslim’s specialty is judo, and he’s very proud of putting his art on screen with what he considers unusual purity. But thankfully realism is not generally the goal here. There’s a whole lot of running on top of or jumping off of other people, which I support. A little of the ol’ Fong Sai Yuk. Probly the most famous image will be Wang Wei swinging that hammer and growing a mountain of bodies under his feet. One character is either very hard to kill or rises from the dead at the most hilarious possible moment.

The guys running the trafficking ring seem like regular sleazy gangster types, and I didn’t recognize Joey Iwanaga (also American) from SAMURAI MARATHON or BABY ASSASSINS 2, so I assumed he was a non-combatant villain who will get his, but not in a duel. Then there’s a big shock scene where a spurt of brutal violence changes the hierarchy of the FURIOUS universe and also pushes him over the edge so that he too is furious (about something he did himself, so it gets a big laugh when he acts like he’s taking revenge for it).

Brutality is one of the primary materials this movie is built out of, not just in the levels of violence and gore, but in the frequency of terrible things happening to characters who don’t “deserve” it. (Along with many who do.) So it’s nice that there’s a sweet little subplot about Rainy mercifully trying to save the kid who baited her into this in the first place, despite his lack of remorse.

I saw this last month as part of the Seattle International Film Festival. There was a midnight show at the ex-Cinerama, but I saw the one the next day in one of the smaller theaters at the Uptown. It was a good crowd, though, laughing and cheering and afterwards I overheard somebody telling his friends about HYDRA, someone else talking about Le being in THE PAPER TIGERS, some others figuring out that the reason they recognized Taslim was MORTAL KOMBAT (oh – he’s Sub-Zero!), another guy saying that it was great but that “other movies walked so it could run,” getting out ahead of the people who will act like THE FURIOUS is the only martial arts movie to ever talk about, the way some people have with THE RAID for 15 years now. I’m sure he’s right, but also don’t worry about those people. Enjoy the moment.

Anyway I bring it up because it seemed like an audience of hardcores mixed with dabblers. and it blasted all of us like the positive version of the Lost Ark. Sometimes I worry about overhyping a movie, but that’s not a big concern with this one. I couldn’t have had higher expectations and it blew me through the back wall of the theater into a wormhole and I lived 250 lives before it spit me back through the same hole and I ricocheted off the wall and back perfectly in my seat after thousands of years of misery but it was worth it. I mean I’m sure there will be some guy somewhere that doesn’t like it, but there’s always that guy. I’ll send him a sympathy card. This is not even a future classic, it’s an established one, I tried to certify it last month and there were already stamps all over it.

Anyway I’m dying to see it again, definitely going, if I see you there we can high five.